Both desire the technology and trade the other can provide, but neither can risk the fate of the home planet based on unfounded trust.

This is especially true of young Tommy Dort and his counterpart on the other ship, to whom he has assigned the name Buck.

Then they present an ultimatum: they will detonate the atomic power packs in their suits if the aliens refuse to go along with their plan, which is for each crew to take the other's ship back to their home planet.

At this point, the aliens begin behaving very strangely, twitching or lying down and kicking the floor.

Naturally, before leaving their own ship, they remove everything that might point back to their home world.

He believes this because, as he tells the Captain, he and Buck spent a good deal of time swapping dirty jokes.

This story was performed as a radio play on Dimension X on September 8, 1951 and on X Minus One on October 6, 1955, condensed somewhat and with a different ending.

The style and the language of First Contact have been seen as illustrative of the Golden Age of science fiction.

[3][4] The court found that regardless of whether Leinster's story first coined the phrase, it had since become a generic and therefore an unprotectable term that described the genre of science fiction in which humans first encounter alien species.

Even if the title was instead "descriptive," a category of terms higher than "generic" that may be protectable, there was no evidence that the title had the required association in the public's mind (known as "secondary meaning") such that its use would normally be understood as referring to Leinster's story.