Actually, as I think about it, it seems like you’re combining Houston, Houston with When It Changed.
The colonist who has no idea what men are sounds like “When It Changed” - but the crude men are in “Houston Houston”
OK great I’ll see if I have When It Changed in my collection. Thanks!
Another question.
I remember a short story in which an unnamed evil dictator is hunkered down, alone in his bunker’s inner sanctum, as enemy forces close in on his devastated city. (He’s described in such terms that it’s almost certainly Hitler, but maybe not). The end is nigh, but then a portal opens up and someone appears - an alien? an angel? a person from the future? - and persuades the dictator to go through the portal. The dictator does so, assuming he’s being rescued, but it turns out the people who set up the portal actually intend to torture him for years and years to come, as punishment for his many terrible crimes.
Ring a bell for anyone?
Sounds like Lester del Reys “I am legion”.
Though there’s a lot of stories with the same structure, with the del Rey being one of the earliest ones.
Short story I first read in (I think) the early '70s, though the book in which it was published could be from the '60s. Could have been by Arthur C Clarke.
An archaeologist Is working in a ruined city on a planet which had been burned off when its star went nova. Other scientists are working on determining when the nova happened. It turns out, based on time and distance, that the light from the nova would have reached Earth in time for it to have been the star over Bethlehem. The story ends with the archaeologist wondering why the millions of people on this planet had to die to mark the birth of one person on a distant planet.
“The Star” by yes, Arthur C. Clarke.
Thank you.
And the fact that the archaeologist (may have been an astrophysicist, I don’t have the story to hand) is a Jesuit priest at least triples his angst.
IMO, one of the most gut-wrenching final lines in literature.
Clarke was good at those. See also “Hatred”.
Wiki confirms he was indeed, a Jesuit and an astrophysicist but not an archaeologist because the story specifically says they were not expecting to find any planets, never mind traces of intelligence.
“It took us a week to drill through the fused rock, since we did not have the proper tools for a task like this. We were astronomers, not archaeologists, but we could improvise.”
Yeah, when the aliens realized that they were doomed, lacking interstellar flight they left an archive on their equivalent of Pluto, a planetoid far enough away to survive the nova.
Even so, I remember the melancholy I felt reading it the first time circa 12-years old.
Thanks for the link. Not quite as I remember it (surprise! 
), but it’s been 50+ years since I read it.
The notion of a group of five people being called a ‘hand’, and said ‘hand’ functioning as a tight spaceship crew AND emotional/physical relationship came up in conversation, but I can’t begin to remember when & where I read it. Google tried to help, but it was NOT any part of Christopher Hinz’s “Paratwa Saga”. For all I know, the notion has entered the lexicon, just as ‘ansible’ did, and it pops up in lots of tales. Help me find it, or all of zem!
That wasn’t from/used in Joan Vinge’s The Outcasts of Heaven Belt was it? The crew of the starship being a small group of intermarried men and women.
It also sounds vaguely like something LeGuin might have written.
Le Guin’s “Nine Lives”?
I’m also thinking of Paul Melko’s “Singularity’s Ring” which has groups of 3 to 6 who together act as a single person (he also published short stories like “Strength Alone” in that universe)
Tangential to all of this, I vaguely remember a sci-fi short story where maybe four aliens have lost maybe the fifth member of their crew, and so recruit an ordinary Earthman to replace the dead guy: they briefly chat with him, about what life is like hereabouts — you know, with sad and lonely people engaging in pointless conflict when they aren’t experiencing a nagging lack of purpose amidst all this meaninglessness — and they ask him to settle in where his human-shaped predecessor used to hang out, and try to sort of push the starship so it’ll get them back on their wondrous journey through the heavens, with the rest of them cooperating via their own tasks.
And: IT WORKS! God, THE ELATION! Oh, THIS, right here, THIS is WHAT WE’RE FOR!