
A bustling corporate tower houses Personnel Incorporated, a gargantuan hiring agency that claims it can find “the man for any job.” When a skeptical client named Maxwell and his nervous companion enter the noisy lobby, they discover a labyrinth of elevators, endless rows of typewriters, and a glass‑walled office where the enigmatic young executive, Whiteford, runs the operation. The building itself feels alive, a modern slave market of paperwork and humming machines, promising to match anyone with a role—no matter how strange.
The duo is on a tight deadline: they need a space‑pilot for the inaugural lunar voyage, and they suspect that only a mind on the edge of sanity could survive such a mission. Their visit quickly turns into a negotiation with Whiteford’s relentless efficiency, as they try to persuade the corporation to supply a candidate who can handle the risks of the unknown. The story blends witty satire of corporate bureaucracy with a dash of sci‑fi ambition, setting the stage for a high‑stakes quest that will test both logic and daring.
Language
en
Duration
~48 minutes (47K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2021-10-26
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1926–2014
A longtime science fiction writer and editor, he was known for smart, fast-moving stories that mixed big ideas with human tension. His career also reached beyond fiction, from magazine work to political speechwriting in San Francisco.
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