Randall Garrett 39 min read

Crayley plots a murder scientific in both motive and method, and as perfect as the mask of his face, standing thoughtful before a huge screen, watching metal fingers build generator after generator.

Randall Garrett's 1956 story is a clever hard-SF and social-SF tale of a coldly calculated crime. Sharp, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a brilliant, dispassionate man engineers the perfect murder in a world of thinking machines, and science itself becomes the instrument of his ambition.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

R. Phillips