The Inquisitor

“The Inquisitor,” was written in May, 1956 for William Hamling's IMAGINATION magazine, as Robert Silverberg writes in his lengthly introduction, "a few weeks before my graduation from Columbia, and put my own byline on it, but when Hamling published it in the December, 1956 issue of IMAGINATION it was credited to Randall Garrett, and so it has remained in bibliographies to this day. It’s my work, though: a compact synthesis, in 2500 words, of the themes of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” two classic works of fiction that would have been very much on my mind as I rounded out my days as a literature major at Columbia."