Escape: The Precision of Madness

A reporter visiting a state asylum meets Gannet, a mild-mannered man with gray hair, sad eyes, and the careful hands of an inventor. Gannet spends hours working in one corner of his cell, using tools that aren’t there to build something no one can see.

The guards call it a harmless delusion. The reporter isn’t so sure. Gannet measures invisible parts, drills invisible holes, and checks his work with the precision of a skilled craftsman. He even claims the floor is three thirty-seconds of an inch off level. Stranger still, he seems perfectly rational when discussing everything except the mysterious object taking shape in his cell.

Then Gannet reveals his intention. He wants out—not merely out of the asylum, but away from a world he can no longer tolerate. He isn’t planning suicide. He’s a mathematician and inventor, and whatever he’s constructing is nearly finished.

Escape should be impossible. His door is locked from the outside, the windows are barred, and no patient has ever gotten past the asylum’s defenses.

Gannet isn’t concerned.

First published in Weird Tales, Escape by Paul Ernst is a wonderfully strange locked-room science fiction mystery that leaves one disturbing possibility: perhaps the man everyone believes is crazy knows something they don’t.

Paul Ernst was a prolific American writer whose fiction appeared in Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and Astounding Stories. His stories included The Temple of Serpents, The Black Monarch, and The Tree-Man. He later became closely associated with The Avenger, writing many adventures published under the house name Kenneth Robeson. In Escape, Ernst turns one man’s invisible invention into a mystery that becomes harder to dismiss with every precise detail.