Jim Harmon 25 min read

An insurance company's new automatic brain is supposed to keep an investigator from wild-goose chases, and instead lands him a purple passion of a very fatal job.

Jim Harmon's 1962 story pits the wry Madison against the Actuarvac, his chrome competitor at Manhattan-Universal Insurance, in a first-contact tale spun from automation. Fast, funny golden-age SF with a hard-boiled voice. Read it for a genial story about a man, a machine, and a job that turns out to be far more dangerous than the office computer predicted.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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