The Genius Machine The Holden Electromechanical Educator made its inventors' five-year-old son the mental equal of most adults. It also made him an orphan. For someone wanted it badly enough to kill Jimmy Holden's mother and father brutally, while the boy watched. The only one he had left to turn to was his guardian, Paul Brennan. But Paul Brennan's was the face he had seen when his parents' murderer was struck. . . . The first time Jimmy ran away, he was caught easily. The next time as well. The third time, he had a plan -- and the means to carry it out. He would be safe now from Paul Brennan -- but not from the one thing he lacked: the fourth "R."

Author Biography

George Oliver Smith (A1911 - 1981) (also known by the pseudonym Wesley Long) was an American science fiction author. Smith was an active contributor to Astounding Science Fiction during the Golden Age of Science Fiction in the 1940s. His collaboration with the magazine's editor, John W. Campbell, Jr. was interrupted when Campbell's first wife, Dona, left him in 1949 and married Smith. Smith continued regularly publishing science fiction novels and stories until 1960. His output greatly diminished in the 1960s and 1970s when he had a job that required his undivided attention. He was given the First Fandom Hall of Fame award in 1980. He was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers. Smith wrote mainly about outer space, with such works as Operation Interstellar (1950), Lost in Space (1959), and Troubled Star (1957). He is remembered chiefly for his Venus Equilateral series of short stories about a communications station in outer space. Most of the stories were collected in Venus Equilateral (1947), which was later expanded with the remaining three stories as The Complete Venus Equilateral (1976). His novel The Fourth "R" (1959) - re-published as The Brain Machine (1968) - was a digression from his focus on outer space and an examination of a child prodigy.