Alice L. Hopf 19 min read

A retired quarantine inspector boards a starliner as a passenger for once, and gets to watch someone else do the confiscating.

Alice Hopf's 1960 story follows Bridget Kelly, longtime scourge of smugglers, savoring the novelty of being an ordinary traveler on a moon-quarantined outbound ship, sizing up her fellow passengers with a professional's eye. A warm, character-driven piece of light space opera about the unglamorous machinery that keeps Earth's pests at bay. Read it for genial golden-age SF with a sharp, likable heroine.

In its time

Published in 1960, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

19 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).