Arnold Marmor 10 min read

Fastidious Captain Colen Shratt, uniform pressed and mustache clipped, is ushered in to see Jules Barnes, who wonders aloud what an intelligence officer could possibly want with him.

Arnold Marmor's 1955 story opens on a tense interview, building a first-contact and social-SF tale. Sharp, intriguing golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a routine intelligence inquiry turns out to concern something that was never in anyone's script.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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