Amos Handworthy has already conquered everything that can be measured. Business, engineering, precision—each challenge rises, and he cuts it down. But none of it satisfies him anymore. What he wants is something no longer available in the modern world: a moment where skill alone decides who walks away.
When an engineer named Manny Steinberg brings new life to one of Handworthy’s intricate machines, it sparks something deeper. The project grows, evolves, and sharpens into something far more dangerous than either man admits at first. Each improvement brings the device closer to perfection, but also closer to something that can’t be safely controlled. What begins as a technical problem turns into a personal test that neither logic nor money can soften.
Handworthy refuses to accept a hollow victory. If there is no risk, there is no meaning. So he keeps pushing, reshaping the machine—and himself—until the outcome can no longer be predicted or undone. In the end, the only question left is whether he truly understands what he has created before the moment arrives when it can no longer be stopped.
Larry Eisenberg published a number of science fiction stories in magazines such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His work often carries a sharp, ironic edge, placing technically minded characters into situations where their own solutions become the source of new problems. In “The Fastest Draw,” that tension is distilled into a single escalating challenge, where precision engineering meets a very human need for something more than control.
