A brilliant engineer named Lewis Crayley watches the automated waldoes build sub-nucleonic generators with mechanical precision, and somewhere in that cold choreography of metal hands and silver nerves, he decides to commit the perfect murder. His rival Berin Klythe has always overshadowed him, and now Klythe stands poised to unveil his greatest triumph. Crayley manipulates the engineering recording system, crafting an accident that kills Klythe during the demonstration and leaves no visible trace of foul play. But in this world of perfect recordings and playback analysis, the machines remember everything, including the subtle betrayals of the human mind. When investigators review the evidence, they find something the killer's conscious self never knew he'd revealed: his guilt written in the spaces between data points, his subconscious screaming on a tape that should have been silent. Randall Garrett constructs a lean, vicious thriller that uses its futuristic technology not as spectacle but as instrument of fate, a 1950s answer to the eternal question of whether the perfect crime truly exists.
