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do was almost impossible, since they acted only from irrational premises. They built beautiful hulls, no question, but their control-and-command functions were mostly lacking—and that made them very dangerous foes indeed.
    â€œâ€˜They’re a-comin’ right at us!’ Scottie the Res-geek said in an even tone of voice. Only an insufficiency of test-tubes ever bothered him.
    â€œâ€˜Then blast the buggers!’ I ordered. I pressed the big red button on the console.
    â€œThe resulting ‘Boom!’ rattled the whole ship. I glanced out the porthole. A giant brown projectile was hurtling right towards the oncoming enemy cruiser. It spattered over their space-wind shield, rendering them effectively blind.
    â€œâ€˜Right turn! Right turn!’ I told the helmslady, and she grabbed the great wheel and rotated it ninety degrees. The Sundogger slid just under the alien ship. We all turned to watch the alien metal cylinder plow a furrow into the third planet of Rastus.
    â€œâ€˜Gee! That was close!’ Scottie mumbled.
    â€œâ€˜Yeah,’ I said, ‘but I never had any doubts when I saw that turd from the sun!’”
    â€”Third from the Sun ,
    by Cole Spayze (1957)
    My conversation with Margie had left me very unsettled, and I spent the rest of the afternoon in a semi-daze. We’d never had a romantic relationship—I mean, I understood that much about her from the beginning—but we had been close friends for a great many years, and I thought I knew all of the important things that there were to know about her. Obviously, I was wrong.
    I couldn’t possibly imagine Margie as the killer—she was just too down-to-earth, it seemed to me. I didn’t think she had the willingness to kill that seems innate in certain individuals, although I knew that almost anyone could be pushed to murder under the right circumstances. But she was one of those individuals whom I regarded as solid and practical and not likely to allow herself to be upset in the kind of way that I envisioned killers to be. But I’d been wrong before, and there was much about her that I clearly didn’t understand.
    What I did know was this: Margie had just become the prime suspect for the murder of Lissa Boaz, at least from the point of view of the cops. I assumed that they had her prints in Lissa’s room, in addition to the supposed eyewitness account of her visitation there at the right time of the evening. I wouldn’t think that a boa would retain prints, but these days, with the technology that the cops have available, there could be a DNA residue or something like that—although those kinds of tests took longer than overnight to gain results, I knew.
    The problem was this: in order to disprove Margie’s connection with the murder, I had to find the real killer, and do so in a way that that individual’s guilt was established beyond any doubt. But there were any number of possible murderers available. Paperback mongering had become a cutthroat business in the past decade. I knew all of the vendors at the show, if not in person, at least by reputation; and perhaps a third of them had been accused or suspected, at one time or another, of questionable business practices. It’s not much of a jump to go from cheating someone (semi-legalized robbery) to banging them over the head to steal their property, which is what might be involved here.
    And then there were the possible personal motivations. What if Margie’s former “friend” was indeed present at the proceedings, perhaps greatly aged or disguised in some way, having been tipped off by Lissa that the one thing that might identify her after all these decades was about to be revealed? This seemed far-fetched to me, because I still couldn’t imagine why anyone would actually care about something that had occurred a half-century earlier; but people do strange things sometimes, and reputation, status, and