Frederik Pohl 9 min read

Sure, Larry Connaught saved my life, but it was how he did it that forced me to murder him. Awaiting the death house, the narrator sets down exactly why he shot his friend dead.

Frederik Pohl's 1955 story is a sharp, gripping psi-and-social-SF tale of a deadly gift and its price. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a man's confession of murder unfolds the terrible reason he had to kill the friend who saved him.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Mel Hunter