George Revelle 18 min read

Exhausted and baffled, Brandon can't recall a single funny thing he's said, yet the Secretary of Interior keeps grinning and toying with a small wooden figure, calling him a real card.

George Revelle's 1957 story is a sharp, uneasy first-contact and social-SF tale of unseen control. Clever, ominous golden-age SF. Read it for a story where an official's strange forced cheer and a little wooden figure hint that someone, or something, is pulling the strings.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban