"Surprise Moves" and Other Stories

These eight stories, two of novella length, are about people and their foibles more than about machines or schemes, although those may be involved with emphasis on the humorous elements. There is funny stuff going on in a train sleeper car, a doctor's office, a walnut grove, an office building lobby, and an unrented office. In "Surprise Moves" an eccentric bachelor inventor finds romance and some security for his devices that n ot even the operatives of the U.S. government agency that regularly helps itself to his ideas are supposed to know about but other groups, including organized crime, have picked up an interest in. In "Security Comes In Twos" two teams of independent security testers find one another in corporate enclosures which one team is under contract to test and the other team are being paid to bug. When they are detected by company security they must help one another to escape or none of them is likely to do so intact. And that repeats.