Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction February 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
ASSASSIN
BY J. F. BONE
Illustrated by Ed Emsh
The aliens wooed Earth with gifts, love, patience and peace.
Who could resist them? After all, no one shoots Santa Claus!
he rifle lay comfortably in his hands, a gleaming precision instrument that exuded a faint odor of gun oil and powder solvent. It was a perfect specimen of the gunsmith's art, a semi-automatic rifle with a telescopic sight—a precisely engineered tool that could hurl death with pinpoint accuracy for better than half a mile.