George O. Smith 27 min read

An insurance adjuster is told to be at a factory tonight at eight, because that's when the accident is scheduled to happen.

George O. Smith's 1946 story sends rookie Peter Wright of Interplanetary Industrial Insurance into a very strange assignment, where the accident precedes the claim. Clever, puzzle-minded hard SF about foreknowledge and its uses. Read it for an ingenious golden-age tale that turns insurance adjusting into a problem of time itself.

In its time

Published in 1946, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Swenson