Alan Edward Nourse 22 min read

Framed by a Mother Goose rhyme about a man who scratched out his eyes and scratched them in again, a scientist confronts a troubling boy.

Alan E. Nourse's 1957 story opens at the Hoffman Center with a haggard field director and a mysterious child, building an idea-driven puzzle around the nursery-rhyme conceit of undoing what was done. Clever, thoughtful first-contact SF. Read it for a sharp golden-age tale that hangs a real scientific mystery on an old rhyme.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban