The Risk Profession by Donald Edwin Westlake

Everyone knows him (DONALD E. WESTLAKE) as the mystery writer who published books like The Hook (2000), Bad News 2001, and Put a Lid on It (2002) under his own name, Donald E. Westlake, and of course that he was also Richard Stark and a number of other favorite authors. But a science fiction writer? — Really? — You bet he was, early on in his career. (He even wrote one SF novel — Anarchaos, in 1966, as “Curt Clark.”) He also wrote quite a bit of short SF, like this weird little SF mystery that first graced the pages of Amazing in 1963.