Joseph Samachson 26 min read

If Ollie Keith knew the work he was really doing, he'd resign, if resigning were possible. Hungry all his forty-two years, he works for a junk collector and fails at that, like everything else.

Joseph Samachson's 1952 story is a warm, ironic first-contact and social-SF tale of an unlikely instrument of great events. Clever, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a story where the most down-and-out man imaginable turns out to be doing work of unimaginable importance, all unaware.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller