Murray Leinster 39 min read

Every con in the book has been tried on the old bootlegger baron, except the Elixir of Youth, and this time the goods might be real.

Murray Leinster's 1950 story is narrated by a sixteen-year-old paired, improbably, with a thousand-year-old Hermes Trismegistus, as a professor's youth-restoration pitch collides with the genuine article. Fast, funny, tall-tale SF with a con-artist heart. Read it for breezy golden-age comedy about the oldest swindle of all, and what happens when it works.

In its time

Published in 1950, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

39 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Lawrence Sterne Stevens