G. L. Vandenburg 40 min read

A job as lab technician at the Army Weapons Development Center carries about as much prestige as a batboy in a World Series, until quiet, unambitious George Fisher turns up dead, ruled a suicide.

G. L. Vandenburg's 1960 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF mystery. Clever, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story where an inconspicuous technician's suspicious death opens onto something larger, and the observers of the title watch a secret military project with hidden purposes.

In its time

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

Reading it

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