Randall Garrett 42 min read

A tugship crew tracks a beeping radio beacon to an anchored asteroid claimed by a Captain St. Simon, routine work at the frontier's thin edge, until it turns out to be anything but.

Randall Garrett's 1963 story is a sharp first-contact and social-SF tale. Clever, engaging golden-age SF. Read it for a well-turned story of asteroid prospectors and a mystery at the edge of settled space, where a routine claim opens onto something stranger, in an inventive golden-age piece with Garrett's characteristic craft and a clever twist.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

John Schoenherr