Randall Garrett 20 min read

Lieutenant Dan Mannion grips the rail of the prisoner's dock, facing total mnemonic erasure if convicted, 'There's nothing I can say,' he tells the presiding commander. 'Nothing at all.'

Randall Garrett's 1957 story is a tense AI-and-space-opera courtroom tale. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a Space Patrol officer faces a trial whose penalty is the erasure of his very self, and the truth of the Mannion court-martial turns on a science-fictional twist.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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