Robert Hoskins 25 min read

'Why?' demands the Extrasol Trader, admitting the problem has been beyond him ever since it cropped up, while his colleague wonders aloud how such a dolt ever rose to manage even a backwater planet.

Robert Hoskins's 1969 story opens on prickly interstellar-corporate banter, building a first-contact social-SF tale on a world called Kash. Sharp, wry golden-age SF. Read it for a story about a baffling problem, a feuding pair of company men, and the clay feet of the powers that be.

In its time

Published in 1969, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban