Walter J. Sheldon 15 min read

A misdialed call in the Pentagon's glitchy new phone system connects the narrator to the 'Office of Historical Research', and 'Zon Twenty speaking', a wrong number of a very unexpected kind.

Walter J. Sheldon's 1955 story is a wry social-SF and time-travel tale. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where a bureaucratic phone mix-up opens an accidental line to the future, in a light, well-turned golden-age piece that spins military red tape and a crossed wire into a comic, time-bending complication.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ernest Kurt Barth