Randall Garrett 22 min read

In a secret Arlington lab, Dr. Wolstadt twists his oscilloscope dials, building the device that will strip the Russians of every secret they have, and give one man the answer to everything.

Randall Garrett's 1956 story is a wry psi-powers and social-SF Cold War tale. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial spy-story twist where a machine grants total knowledge, with a catch, in a witty golden-age piece that turns the dream of knowing everything into a headache, quite literally, for the man who gets it.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay