Day of Reckoning by Morton Klass Episode #462

Morton Klass | December 12, 2025

Day of Reckoning by Morton Klass Episode #462
Morton Klass

DAY OF RECKONING

Episode #462 · Written by Morton Klass · Narrated by Scott Miller

The Roggs have finally surrendered, and an old freedom fighter sits across the table from the alien who once held his life in a whip’s shadow. On humanity’s long-awaited day of victory, one last, unexpected gesture will decide what kind of people we’ve truly become.

“Day Of Reckoning” by Morton Klass begins at the end of a war that has lasted almost half a century. Earth has finally thrown off the yoke of the Roggs, pale, whip-wielding conquerors who once scattered humanity into slave pens and mines from the Arctic wastes to tropical hellholes. In a former slave hut that now serves as a council chamber, an aged human leader sits at the head of a scarred wooden table, four battle-hardened veterans at his back, and faces Guja Hi, the Rogg administrator who once owned him. The terms are simple and absolute: the Roggs will leave Earth with only their cloaks, their lives spared but their ships, homes, and machines claimed as reparations by the people they once enslaved.

As the two speak, Klass weaves in the long, painful history that led to this day. We see how the Roggs exploited humanity’s divisions, nudged us toward self-destruction, and then imposed their language and their rule on the survivors. Yet we also see how, under that same oppression, humanity quietly changed: a new common tongue, Earthwide, arose in the shadows; scattered slaves created elaborate secret rituals of welcome and trust; and, above all, people across the globe swore an Oath that no human would ever again lift a hand against another. By the time the uprising comes, the species that throws off the Roggs is not the same fractured humanity the invaders first conquered.

Now, with the Roggs disarmed, hungry, and trapped behind force fields of their own making, the new world government must honor the promise that secured their surrender: spare their lives and send them away. Guja Hi pleads for their ships, their stations, some fragment of their wealth, warning that exile with nothing is a sentence of death or slavery on their own harsh homeworld. The old man knows he is right—and he remembers, with searing clarity, the whippings, the dead children, the bombed cities, and the cultures wiped away. This is humanity’s day, a chance to seize everything the Roggs built and claim it without apology.

But Klass refuses to make the choice simple. As the crowd outside grows restless, impatient to see the aliens expelled, the narrator’s thoughts circle back to what the conquest inadvertently gave humanity: unity, a shared language, and the unbreakable idea that “all men are brothers.” If the Roggs taught us anything, it is what happens when power is used only to dominate and humiliate. On this final day, standing before the alien who once ordered him flogged, the old leader must decide whether the new humanity will merely mirror its former masters—or walk away changed, with one final, unexpected gesture that redefines what “reckoning” really means.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Morton Klass (1927–2001) was an American anthropologist and writer whose career bridged the worlds of imaginative fiction and serious scholarship. Born in Brooklyn, Klass served in the United States Merchant Marine before pursuing formal study at Brooklyn College, where he earned his B.A., and at Columbia University, where he completed his Ph.D. in anthropology. Beginning in the 1950s, he published a small but striking body of science fiction, including “The Altruist,” “The Idealists,” “In the Beginning,” “The Kappa Nu Nexus” (with Avram Davidson), and “Day Of Reckoning,” stories that appeared in magazines like Science Fiction Quarterly, The Original Science Fiction Stories, and Fantastic Universe. Even in these early works, his fascination with social systems, moral choices, and the pressure of history on ordinary people shines through.

In his academic life, Klass became known for influential fieldwork and writing on caste, kinship, and religion, particularly in South Asia and the Indo-Caribbean. He taught for decades at Barnard College, Columbia University, and directed the university’s Southern Asian Institute, producing important studies such as East Indians in Trinidad: A Study of Cultural Persistence, From Field to Factory, Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social System, and later works on spirit possession, belief, and cultural change. His dual background in anthropology and storytelling gave him a rare ability to imagine alien conquests, human resistance movements, and future societies with a sharp eye for how real communities actually behave under pressure. “Day Of Reckoning” reads not only as a gripping post-invasion drama but also as a thoughtful meditation on empire, solidarity, and the difficult work of becoming better than the forces that once oppressed you.

LISTEN TO THE STORY

Listen to Day of Reckoning by Morton Klass — a tense vintage science fiction tale of human unity, revenge, and mercy.

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