Weekly Short Story: A Suppliant in Space by Robert Sheckley

A suppliant is defined as someone who makes a humble plea to an authority or power.  Science fiction writer Robert Sheckley's 1973 short story A Suppliant in Space carries this meaning and provides a piercing satire on the state of our contemporary society with regard to doctrinally rigid social mores and militarism.  The inflexible dogmatism is from the world of Ferlang, in a nearby galaxy.  One of its inhabitants, named Detringer, has been convicted and banished to deep space for basically thumbing his nose at his society and acting out in a foolish manner.  He manages somehow to cross the void between his galaxy and ours...and lands on a planet about the same time that humanity's first interstellar expedition...replete with a military team in case they feel they have to destroy somebody...gets there.  And then the fun begins...

The dialogue between Detringer and Earth's bellicose Colonel Ketterman is classic, with the Ferlang exile twisting logic into contortions around the military man.  How it all ends...well, you'd better read it for yourself.  Instead I'd like to point out that the military and war have always been themes of not only our space program, but also of most of the movies we've seen about space exploration.  The race to the moon in the 1960s was an outgrowth of the grim competition in the Cold War between the East and the West for ballistic missile accuracy and range.  No doubt once permanent stations and settlements begin on the moon, Mars, and other worlds, the rumbles of war will never be very far away, sad to say.  Part of me is very enthusiastic about what seems to be America's renewed commitment to manned space travel and exploration...and part of me is anxious about the weapons of war spreading to space, not only creating the possibility of armed conflict there but also casting a threatening shadow over the only planet we currently have to live on, our precious Earth...

I found A Suppliant in Space in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents the 1974 Annual World's Best SF (DAW Books).  It also features Detringer's talkative robot companion, who predates Star Wars' C-3PO by four years...as well as the socially-challenged scientist/civilian commander of the Earth crew. This story is probably in other collections as well...you'll probably get a kick out of it like I did...