John Victor Peterson 19 min read

Quintuplets alone would be bad enough, without a census taker who can count them in advance. And Maitland Browne, atomics genius and practical joker, has picked tonight to work on Fitzgerald.

John Victor Peterson's 1957 story is a light, clever first-contact and social-SF tale with a comic touch. Fun, breezy golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where a prankster genius and an impossibly prescient census-taker set off a chain of delightfully strange events.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

John Schoenherr