Rog Phillips 36 min read

Pounding at the door at three-thirty wakes small-time crook Benny, who mentally tallies last night's lifted wallets before the cop hauls him off to a strange lineup facing a screen.

Rog Phillips's 1953 story is a clever social-SF and time-travel tale of crime, justice, and second chances. Sharp, twisty golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a petty thief's routine arrest turns into a very unusual sort of lineup, with the past itself on display.

In its time

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

Reading it

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