Philip K. Dick 40 min read

Offered freedom from prison, the trader and hunter Conger takes a strange commission from a future Council, to travel back in time and assassinate a man, armed only with a preserved skull.

Philip K. Dick's 1952 story is a sharp time-travel tale with a classic PKD twist. Ingenious, unsettling, superbly turned. Read it for early Dick, a hired killer sent into the past to murder the founder of a hated movement, in a clever, paradox-laden story that already bears the master's fascination with identity and fate.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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