Henry Lee 10 min read

Under frosty stars, an underground agent with a forged 48-hour pass steps toward the dark, foreboding bulk of the Pentagon, where one week's work will stand or fall.

Henry Lee's 1955 story builds a taut military-and-AI thriller around a spy's infiltration of a fortress command center. Sharp, suspenseful golden-age SF. Read it for a tense tale of espionage and machine logic, where a single forced move decides everything.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ernest Kurt Barth