J. Harvey Haggard 7 min read

Tau, the six-foot metal man, a half-sentient messenger from the far distant past, strides impassively through the ferny jungle of the Fourteenth Planet, heeding neither bird nor scurrying thing.

J. Harvey Haggard's 1948 story is an atmospheric AI-and-space-opera tale of an ancient robot's long errand. Vivid, evocative golden-age pulp. Read it for a moody story of a patient machine-being from the deep past, carrying out a task across the ages on a small green world at the edge of a distant galaxy.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Hardison