Keith Laumer 54 min read

When time-traveling thief Dan Slane sets out to swindle a reclusive art collector, he stumbles into something far bigger, the impending first contact between Earth and the Great Galactic Union.

Keith Laumer's 1963 story is a fast, funny first-contact and social-SF romp. Clever, breezy golden-age SF. Read it for vintage Laumer, a small-time con man tangled in time-travel and galactic bureaucracy, in a witty, twisty caper that turns a petty scam into the fate of the whole planet.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Jack Gaughan