Evelyn E. Smith 43 min read

Two weeks before the Herringbone heads home, a scout disastrously reports intelligent life on the nineteenth moon of the eleventh planet, discovered, of all people, by the hapless Harkaway.

Evelyn E. Smith's 1957 story spins a comic first-contact space opera from an inconvenient discovery and a bungling crewman. Fun, witty golden-age SF. Read it for a delightful tale where an exasperated captain's worst officer stumbles onto exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Diane Dillon