Mari Wolf 26 min read

Poor telepathic alien Riuku can read every mind around a top-secret weapons factory, the lot attendant, the waitress, yet not one human he touches has any idea what the new weapon actually is.

Mari Wolf's 1954 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF comedy. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a delightful spy-story inversion where a mind-reading alien agent is defeated not by security but by sheer human ignorance and muddle, in a genial golden-age satire of secrecy, war-work, and the female mind.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller