Bascom Jones 20 min read

An alien agent strides through the Pentagon in a perfect disguise, boot-heels ringing, toward a door and a deed that dwarfs mere murder.

Bascom Jones's 1961 story follows an infiltrator drilled in 20th-century Earth history, hunting for the word 'assassin' and finding it inadequate to a plan that would kill a whole planet. Cold, tense social SF about infiltration and genocide. Read it for a chilling golden-age tale told entirely from the enemy's measured point of view.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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