Murray Leinster 32 min read

Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald finds a fine meerschaum pipe left with his morning milk, no card, no message, and swears bitterly before dropping it, like the other gifts, at the orphanage.

Murray Leinster's 1960 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF tale of an honest cop and a racket. Clever, genial golden-age SF. Read it for a story where mysterious gifts keep arriving for an incorruptible detective, and stopping a new kind of racketeer takes something stranger than ordinary police work.

In its time

Published in 1960, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

John Schoenherr