Dirk Wylie Frederik Pohl 29 min read

In a spaceport dive, a jaded man is pestered by a slight, luminous-eyed Palladian 'kid', one of a race gone strangely mad about money.

Dirk Wylie and Frederik Pohl's 1942 story opens with the weary MacCauley brushing off an asterite stripling while the bartender threatens to bar it, sketching a world where the local aliens are inexplicably fixated on cash. Colorful, offbeat golden-age space opera with a social-satirical edge. Read it for atmospheric pulp SF and an intriguing alien obsession from an early Pohl collaboration.

In its time

Published in 1942, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

29 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).