A hard-boiled detective is drawn into the Baxter household expecting an ordinary murder and instead finds a nightmare hidden in plain sight: Calvin Baxter lies unconscious with a tiny, inexplicable wound in his forehead, while his sharp-tongued brother Leo stands nearby with answers that make no sense. What begins as a baffling case of apparent murder quickly becomes a scientific mystery when Calvin's strange workshop invention, the i-Gun, is revealed to make metal objects vanish without touching flesh. Leo turns the device into a cheap toy sensation, and the detective watches in alarm as a harmless novelty becomes a national catastrophe. Soon people, animals, and vehicles are appearing with tiny holes driven through them, panic spreads through the city, and authorities fear everything from enemy attack to aliens. Beneath the chaos lies a far worse truth: the i-Gun fires metal into another dimension, where it later returns as invisible, lethal shards. As hospitals overflow and society unravels, the detective, Chief Durstine, and Dr. Thorsen race to understand the disaster before the hidden fragments kill again. In the end, survival depends on a crude but brilliant detector, and the world learns too late that a child's toy can bring civilization to the brink. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.
