Brain Twister
By Laurence Janifer
He fished in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes, found one, and extracted a single cigarette. He stuck it in his mouth and started fishing in various pockets for his lighter. He sighed again. Perfectly honestly, he preferred cigars, a habit he’d acquired from the days when he’d stolen them from his father’s cigar- case. But his mental picture of a fearless and alert young FBI agent didn’t include a cigar.
Somehow, remembering his father as neither fearless nor, exactly, alert—anyway, not the way the movies and the TV screens liked to picture the words—he had the impression that cigars looked out of place on FBI agents. And it was, in any case, a small sacrifice to make. He found his lighter and shielded it from the brisk wind. He looked over the water at the Jefferson Memorial and was surprised that he’d managed to walk as far as he had. Then he stopped thinking about walking, took a puff of his cigarette, and forced himself to think about the job. Naturally, the Westinghouse gadget had been declared Ultra Top Secret as soon as it worked out. Virtually everything was these days. The whole group involved in the machine and its workings had been transferred immediately to the United States Laboratories out in Yucca Flats, Nevada.
Out there in the desert, there just wasn’t much to do, Malone supposed, except to play with the machine. And, of course, look at the scenery. But when you’ve seen one desert, Malone thought confusedly, you’ve seen them all. So, the scientists ran experiments on the machine and discovered a kind they hadn’t been looking for.
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Laurence Janifer
Laurence M. Janifer (born Laurence M. Harris; March 17, 1933 – July 10, 2002) was an American science fiction author with a career spanning over 50 years.
Biography
Janifer was born in Brooklyn, New York, with the surname of Harris, but in 1963, he took the original surname of his Polish grandfather. Many of his early stories appeared under the “Larry M. Harris” byline. Though his first published work was a short story in Cosmos magazine in 1953, his career as a writer can be said to have started in 1959 when he began writing for Astounding and Galaxy Science Fiction.
He co-wrote the first novel in the “Psi-Power” series, Brain Twister, written with Randall Garrett under the joint pseudonym Mark Phillips. The story was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960 and published in book form in 1962. Janifer’s best-known work is the “Survivor” series, comprising five novels and many short stories. The series follows the career of Gerald Knave as he visits (and survives to tell the tale of) planets on the outskirts of the civilized galaxy.
In addition to his career as a novelist and short story author, Janifer was an editor for Scott Meredith Literary Agency, editor/managing editor of various detective and science fiction publications, a film reviewer for several magazines, and a talented pianist.
Laurence Janifer
