Arthur Porges 11 min read

'If the Syndicate is half as powerful as claimed, they'll murder me any day now', so begins the confession of a man whose good deed against the drug trade has marked him for death.

Arthur Porges's 1959 story is a sharp hard-SF and social-SF tale of one man's scientific war on narcotics. Clever, driven golden-age SF. Read it for a story where an embittered inventor's revenge on the drug syndicate makes him a target of both the guilty and the ungrateful.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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