Ron Goulart 15 min read

Holman comes down out of a forest of giant orange-woods and crosses the plain toward the old grounded spaceship where Nancy Tanner lives, a dark flowered rug hung over the gangway rail.

Ron Goulart's 1958 story is a quiet, atmospheric first-contact and psi-powers tale set on a strange frontier world. Warm, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for an unusually gentle Goulart, a lonely, lyrical tale of two settlers on an alien planet, and the odd gift that lies between them.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban