John Victor Peterson 29 min read

On a sultry night, a harried controller at La Guardia's radarscope tracks something that shouldn't be there.

John Victor Peterson's 1954 story adopts a documentary-realist style, drawing on the author's grasp of space navigation to build a grounded first-contact tale around an air-traffic anomaly. Convincing, procedural golden-age SF. Read it for tautly realistic magazine SF that finds wonder in the ordinary machinery of the control tower.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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