Charles E. Fritch 26 min read

A man has covered his tracks so well even his wife knows nothing, but someone in his office is a World Bureau agent, and then the robot arrives.

Charles E. Fritch's 1953 story tightens the paranoia around Arthur Dunlop, bent over blueprints amid the angry-bee hum of electronic typewriters in a surveillance state. Tense, atmospheric dystopian SF about secrecy and the machinery of the police state. Read it for a taut golden-age tale of a man watching his own back as the net closes.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

H. R. Smith