Jim Harmon 25 min read

'You see my problem, Professor?' Tony Carmen spreads his flashily ringed hands, a Mafia man come to a government scientist with a warmly embarrassing proposition no doctor or lawyer can solve.

Jim Harmon's 1962 story is a wry hard-SF and social-SF tale with a comic edge. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where organized crime and cutting-edge science make unlikely partners, and a straitlaced professor is drawn into a scheme stranger than any racket.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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