Mack Reynolds 25 min read

Joe Prantera softly says 'Big Louis sent me, Al,' and pulls the shotgun's trigger, and at that instant the universe caves inward, hurling the hit man through all space and time.

Mack Reynolds's 1953 story yanks a Prohibition-era gunman out of his own killing and into a strange future with a job in mind for him. Sharp, ironic time-travel social SF. Read it for a clever tale about a mobster snatched across the ages, and the very particular use a later world has for his talents.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

H. R. Van Dongen