Laurence M. Janifer 30 min read

'I'm not an officer, I'm not even an enlisted man,' Mr. Carboy tells the deferential Captain who keeps saluting him, half an hour before a landing he means to handle in his own peculiar way.

Laurence M. Janifer's 1961 story is a clever first-contact and social-SF tale of strategy and deception. Sharp, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a mysterious civilian agent, awed and obeyed by the crew, sets out on a mission whose secret is that winning it means, deliberately, to lose.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Douglas