Ernest M. Kenyon 15 min read

Collins snaps his pencil and hurls the pieces across the lab, hands trembling: the restrictions, the red tape, the endless security measures of the government labs have finally closed in on his mind.

Ernest M. Kenyon's 1956 story is a taut dystopian social-SF tale of a scientist crushed by secrecy. Sharp, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story that captures the suffocating paranoia of the classified Cold War lab, and one man pushed past the breaking point.

In its time

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

Reading it

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