NEVER TRUST A THIEF!

Episode #174· Written by Robert Silverberg · Narrated by Scott Miller

Kiley has always trusted his own skill. Locks fail. Guards blink. Jewel rooms open. When a disembodied voice offers him freedom from a prison cell and the power to walk anywhere unquestioned, he recognizes opportunity and takes it without hesitation.

With instant hypnosis flowing through his mind, he strolls into palaces and lifts fortunes in gemstones while emperors politely step aside. The partnership seems flawless. One mind supplies the power. The other supplies the daring. The galaxy feels suddenly small.

But every alliance between thieves carries an unspoken calculation. As Kiley sets course for his partner’s distant world to divide a fortune in rare jewels, unease begins to creep in. Telepathy leaves no private thought untouched. Greed has a way of growing louder in silence. And when he finally arrives, the scale of what he has joined forces with forces him to confront a simple, brutal fact: in this partnership, size matters.

The tension in “Never Trust a Thief!” does not rest on gadgets or space battles. It grows from the uneasy intimacy of shared minds and the quiet arithmetic of betrayal. Silverberg builds the story toward a single moment of reckoning, where confidence turns thin and the cost of trust becomes terrifyingly clear.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Silverberg sold his first professional stories in 1954 and quickly became one of the most productive writers in American science fiction. His work appeared regularly in Amazing Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction, If, and other major magazines during the late 1950s. Over the decades he expanded far beyond short fiction, producing celebrated novels such as Dying Inside, Nightwings—which won the Hugo Award—and the Majipoor sequence beginning with Lord Valentine’s Castle. Silverberg’s career spans thousands of stories and articles, marked by sharp irony, psychological edge, and an instinct for turning a simple premise into a moment of moral shock. “Never Trust a Thief!” reflects his early command of pace and reversal, where ambition and overconfidence collide in a single, unforgettable instant.

LISTEN TO THE STORY

Listen to Never Trust a Thief! by Robert Silverberg — a vintage sci-fi short story of a telepathic alliance that leads a master thief to a fatal reckoning.

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