Harlan Ellison 22 min read

Reach into your safe and there's money; the more you take, the more you find, just as the D.A. closes in and your future's cut to nothing. A wonderful discovery. Or is it?

Harlan Ellison's 1956 story is a sharp hard-SF and social-SF tale of an impossible windfall and its price. Clever, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a man's endlessly self-refilling safe promises to make him the richest in the world, if it doesn't destroy him first.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay