A few months ago I came across an amazing short science fiction story and now I can't find it. Please help! Here's all I can remember:

- The story is told from two points of view. First is from the point of view of two humans on a small deep range exploration craft. More like a capsule than a starship. They are in hypersleep or suspended animation or some such thing until their small craft picks up a signal or energy source and automatically diverts to it. Their ship also wakes them from sleep.

- A pair of aliens has detected a fast moving object traveling through a system they are in. At first it seems begin. Like an asteroid or something. There are no energy signatures, no life signs. But then it changes course and soon life signs are detected. They move in to investigate.

- The aliens beam the two humans down to a moon or some such uninhabited place and the two sides have a discussion. In it the aliens, who are speaking to the humans mind to mind, explain some of the history of the galaxy, In particular there was one race (who's name I can't remember and might be in the title!) that was far more intelligent and powerful than all the others. I think they had enslaved a large portion of the galaxy, but what I clearly remember is the two aliens telling the humans how the galaxy had eventually teamed up to defeat this evil alien race.

- Over a long period of time the good races of the galaxy beat back this evil race, but they were never able to track down their homeworld. Apparently there is, still to this day, an extermination order against this evil race, and if they are ever found they will be completely destroyed. One of the humans is fascinated by the story, but the other one realizes the truth. Humanity IS the remnants of the evil, super powerful, super intelligent alien race. The aliens apologize then painlessly kill the two human explorers.

- The aliens then examine the Human's capsule and unfortunately find no data about where it came from or where it was going. Still the technology it had, to be able to travel huge distances nearly undetected, and to be able to put its passengers into suspended animation so they would not show up on scans, amazes them.

- The story ends with the lead alien musing that the races of the galaxy are afraid that this evil race will come back, but he worries that the evil race, that we now know is humanity, may rediscover their former strength in secret and come back ready to take on the entire galaxy once more.

Other things I remember:

- The author's name is somewhat recognizable in scifi.
- This is not that author's only story, there are (probably) many more
- The author is also know for something other than scifi stories. Something fairly important, but I don't remember what
- I'm pretty sure I discovered the story on a site that had a fairly large public collection of this author's work
- I'm fairly sure I discovered this story by linking to it from somewhere in the Mac web... I'm thinking Daring Fireball but I can't seem to find any mention of it on the site...
- This is not a recent story. I want to say it's more classic scifi and certainly wan't written in the last 30 years or so... I don't think.

Does anybody know the story I'm looking for?

- No text -

Is it "With Friends Like These" by Alan Dean Foster?

Don't think so. The setting was not on earth since earth was ultimately the planet the rest of the galaxy wanted to find and destroy for humanity's past crimes.

I believe this may be the story that you were looking for:

http://hell.pl/szymon/Baen/The%20best%20of%20Jim%20Baens%20Universe/The%20World%20Turned%20Upside%20Down/0743498747__...

Wow! It's amazing how much my vague recollection of this story changed it in my mind. I had the plot slightly out of order, and had forgotten about the desert, but this is 100% it! Thanks a lot! :)

Wow! It's amazing how much my vague recollection of this story changed it in my mind. I had the plot slightly out of order, and had forgotten about the desert, but this is 100% it! Thanks a lot! :)

It's funny, reading that, to pick out all the little tidbits that are so dated, especially now that we have so much more information from Hubble and all of our other studies. It's still a good story, so I'm glad someone finally found it. :)

It's funny, reading that, to pick out all the little tidbits that are so dated, especially now that we have so much more information from Hubble and all of our other studies. It's still a good story, so I'm glad someone finally found it. :)

Yeah I found that pretty funny as well. I went through several other short stories before I finally came across this one and some of them were even more dated in their assumptions about space (which is reasonable given the time they were written, but still funny to look at now).

I did a lot of reading over the past few days to find it. I love short stories so was very interested in finding the source, and found some new ones along the way!

What did you search for / how did you find it?

What did you search for / how did you find it?

My first attempts were just to go through some of the stories in Project Gutenberg where you mentioned you thought it was an older story. That did not pan out, so I did some pretty specific searches in Google based on the tidbits from the story that you had remembered such as:

sci fi short stories aliens search for human home world

That didn't produce much in the way of results but I did see lots of links from the Sci Fi Stack Exchange and people asking for titles of stories they had read. So I made the search site specific and shorted it to the following:

site: scifi.stackexhange.com short story telepathic alients

And the second link had what you were looking for. I just did a search for the title and author to get the link I put in the post.