Richard Rein Smith 24 min read

How do you kill a man without killing him? Unless Earth can answer that riddle, it will lose the war, and in a maze of mirrors, a captive is forced to stare endlessly at his own tormented image.

Richard Rein Smith's 1958 story is a taut military-SF and social-SF tale. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a tense story of psychological warfare and an agonizing interrogation, where Earth's survival hinges on solving an impossible paradox, in a claustrophobic, well-turned golden-age piece about breaking a man to win a war.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Richard Kluga