Jr. L. J. Stecher 18 min read

The job was easy and the profit enormous, the only trouble was that the cargo had a will of its own. And an elephant named Beulah.

L. J. Stecher's 1963 story opens with a battered Captain Hannah socking the narrator on sight, unspooling a wry space-opera yarn of a hauling job gone gloriously wrong. Light, funny golden-age SF with a memorable menagerie. Read it for breezy interstellar comedy where the freight fights back.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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