Death Wish

Aboard the space freighter Queen Dierdre, a three-man crew faces certain death when a malfunction burns nearly all their fuel at once, sending the ship accelerating uncontrollably out of the solar system and condemning them to die in the void between the stars. With escape seemingly impossible, the desperate men, the captain, the engineer, and the navigator, turn to the advanced Fahrensen Computer they happen to be hauling as cargo, hoping its superior intelligence can find a way out. But the machine's coldly logical responses force the crew to confront the gap between human hope and mechanical reasoning, and the unsettling question of what survival on the computer's terms would actually mean. A sharp, ironic short story by Robert Sheckley, a master of satirical science fiction, it first appeared in 1956 in the era of the great SF magazines. Brief, ingenious, and built around a chilling twist, it is a characteristic example of golden-age speculative fiction's fascination with thinking machines and the perils of trusting them.