Tom Leahy 11 min read

'Why, Mr. Bartle, come in, this is indeed a pleasure,' the little man beams, ushering the bored interviewer into a great room lined with gray metal boxes and their slowly turning spools of tape.

Tom Leahy's 1954 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF tale set among endless reels of reproduction tape. Clever, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly strange story where a jaded reporter's routine personality interview leads him into the presence of a most unusual keeper of the tapes.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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