Robert Moore Williams 26 min read

A sheriff's posse and baying bloodhounds hunt the moronic but cunning Tommy through Ten Mile Valley, the offbeat opening of a tale of a simple man and a very strange, very dangerous invention.

Robert Moore Williams's 1942 story is a lively hard-SF adventure. Clever, fun golden-age SF. Read it for a genial backwoods yarn where a supposed halfwit turns out to command an astonishing power, in a fast-moving golden-age piece that mixes rural manhunt with wild scientific wonder and a sympathetic, unlikely hero.

In its time

Published in 1942, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Robert Fuqua