Jack Sharkey 58 min read

The baby is lonesome, helpless, and afraid, and it isn't his fault he's seven hundred feet tall.

Jack Sharkey's 1962 story brings back his Contact zoologist Jerry Norcriss to study a colossal, frightened infant traced on a technician's screen. Inventive, oddly touching first-contact SF built on a startling image. Read it for imaginative golden-age SF that finds real feeling in a giant baby lost among the stars.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Jack Gaughan