Iskalde Grøss #3 [1988]

In the near future, the Western and Eastern Alliances wage a desperate race to claim the Moon, only to see their ships repeatedly destroyed by an invisible barrier just beyond reach. As the conflict escalates, they uncover a shocking truth: the barrier encircles the entire Earth, trapping humanity in a cage. The reason? A higher intelligence sees humans as dangerously wild—too violent to be free.

In "Mannen som kappløp med tiden," Julius, passed over for the chairmanship of the Physics Department in favor of his rival Bruce, turns to his revolutionary Spherical Accelerator in a desperate bid for vindication. When he learns Bruce and Christine are to be married that same day, his ambition twists into a dangerous plan—only to spiral into unforeseen consequences.

In "Hjemlengsel!", David Todd, a man on a mission to Mars, finds himself entangled in a deadly conspiracy with his colleague Lynn Ardsley, who conspires with him to murder their companion Lawrence. After Lawrence’s death and a fabricated report of a mysterious virus, David returns to an abandoned space station—now his prison—exiled from Earth and doomed to spend his life alone among the stars.

In "Kaleidoskop!", a lone Venusian man, caught between rebellion and resignation, attempts a desperate act of defiance as his people conquer Earth—only to discover his grand plan was nothing more than a dream born from the wreckage of a forgotten ship. What begins as a moment of explosive resistance unravels into a quiet reckoning, as he returns to the quiet drudgery of his life as a slave, the weight of what might have been lingering in the silence between stars.

In "Dommedag!", an Earth astronaut named Tarlton tours a planet where orange and blue robots coexist under a deeply unequal system, despite their identical construction. As he witnesses the stark injustice faced by the blue robots, Tarlton makes a quiet but firm decision that will shape the planet’s future. The story ends with a striking reveal: Tarlton removes his helmet, showing he is black.

In "Hjerneføde," an Earth ship returns to a world it once seeded over 50,000 years prior, hoping to find a planet ready for colonization. What they discover instead is a twisted evolutionary path that has made the world inhospitable to humans—so they prepare to erase it and begin again, unaware that a sentient tree now watches from the ruins.

In a future where a radioactive comet has rendered all mammals sterile, two aging scientists make a desperate bid to save humanity by sending a time wave back to the past. Their plan hinges on summoning people from the past to the present to repopulate Earth, but when the experiment begins at Grand Central Station, only men start arriving—leading to a baffling and unintended consequence.