Exile to Hell

It appeared in the May 1968 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact and was included in the 1975 collection Buy Jupiter and Other Stories.

The serialization of his novelization of Fantastic Voyage in The Saturday Evening Post in 1966 filled Asimov with the ambition to publish an original story there before the magazine ceased publication.

The Post rejected the story, though, just as they would have in their heyday twenty years before (as Asimov noted in In Joy Still Felt).

A man named Jenkins is put on trial after accidentally damaging a computer system that potentially could have a disastrous effect on the totally computerized underground society in which he lives.

The trial, which is carried out by computers programmed with prosecution and defence arguments, finds Jenkins guilty of equipment damage, a major crime by the society's laws.