Damon Knight 19 min read

On the observation deck of a starliner lies a dead man, and beside him a five-foot lump of black mud with stumpy filaments, which stirs, points toward the stars, and flows silently away.

Damon Knight's 1949 story is a sharp, humane first-contact space opera. Clever, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a fine early Knight tale of a strange alien aboard a passenger ship and the panic it provokes, in a story that quietly turns the monster-hunt inside out with intelligence and compassion.

In its time

Published in 1949, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Herman B. Vestal