Murray Leinster 58 min read

Somebody punched the wrong button in a computer, in a matter where mistakes are not permissible, and the consequence unspools across the sky.

Murray Leinster's 1957 story is a sharp hard-SF space opera built on the perils of a single careless error. Clever, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story where one small computer mistake sets off a chain of events, and human ingenuity must set right what should never have gone wrong.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

H. R. Van Dongen