The Project Gutenberg EBook of No Strings Attached, by Lester del Rey

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Title: No Strings Attached

Author: Lester del Rey

Illustrator: Kelly Freas

Release Date: May 16, 2010 [EBook #32395]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.

No Strings Attached

By Lester del Rey

Illustrated by Kelly Freas

_Poor Henry was an unhappy husband whose wife had a habit of
using bad cliches. Alfear was a genii who was, quite like
most humans, a creature of habit. Their murder compact was
absolutely perfect, with--_

* * * * *

Committing a perfect murder is a simple matter. Drive out some night
to a lonely road, find a single person walking along out of sight of
anyone else, offer him a ride, knife him, and go home. In such a
crime, there's no reason to connect killer and victim--no motive, no
clue, no suspect.

To achieve the perfect murder of a man's own wife, however, is a
different matter. For obvious reasons, husbands are always high on the
suspect list. Who has a better reason for such a crime?

Henry Aimsworth had been pondering the problem with more than academic
interest for some time. It wasn't that he hated his wife. He simply
couldn't stand the sight or sound of her; even thinking about her made
his flesh crawl. If she had been willing to give him a divorce, he'd
have been content to wish her all the happiness she was capable of
discovering. But Emma, unfortunately, was fond of being his wife;
perhaps she was even fond of him. Worse, she was too rigidly bound to
trite morality to give him grounds to sue.

There was no hope of her straying. What had been good enough for her
mother