Albert Teichner 29 min read

Hovering half a million miles out, the crew of the Probe puzzle over a Terra-scale planet of human-seeming beings, who, alone in all the galaxy, refuse to signal or answer their fellow worlds.

Albert Teichner's 1963 story is a thoughtful first-contact and social-SF tale. Sharp, intriguing golden-age SF. Read it for a well-turned puzzle story of a human-seeming world that has cut itself off from the galactic community, and the explorers who must learn why, in a clever golden-age piece about isolation and the tracks that divide.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

George Schelling