This is the first of Roger Wagner's Assembly Lines column which began its illustrious run in the October, 1980 issue. The OCR and reprint processing of this article was made possible in part by the support of STAP Project Backer, Chris Torrence. Chris is a currently working (with the support and interest of Roger) on "Roger Wagner's Assembly Lines: The Missing Volume" (or whatever it will be called). This new publication will bring together the Assembly Lines columns from Softalk magazine that did not make it to book form prior to the end of Softalk Publishing.

Due to his unselfish and heroic dedication to the too-often thankless but ultimately essential and critical task of helping to organize and do the necessary bulk scanning of Softalk issues in advance of our being able to jump all over it playing FactMiners, I hereby decree that Wednesday, March 19th, 2014 is Pete 'Lo-Res' Caylor MegaScanner Hero Day throughout the Land. Hear ye, hear ye! All Friends of Softalk thank you, and I hereby award you a bonus of 500 FactMiners pre-launch game points. :-)

Over the years since 1887 when Sherlock Holmes first appeared in publication, there have been many a gnarly case his keen skills in abductive reasoning have solved. But the case of the Analytic Engine in the April 1984 issue of Softalk truly tested the limits of his deductive thinking.

Take a short and clever dive into an example of Softalk's Storytalk Fiction as we reprint Bruno Wolff's short story. Scans of the actual pages (154-57) can be found in the April '84 issue profile.