The Ambulance Made Two Trips

The Ambulance Made Two Trips is a science fiction short story by Murray Leinster, first published in the April 1960 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. It combines crime fiction with speculative ideas about psychic phenomena and probability.

The story follows Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald as he investigates a series of strange accidents connected to a local racketeer who has been intimidating businesses throughout town. The latest target is a cleaning and dyeing business operated by Brink, but every attempt to threaten or destroy his property ends in an extraordinary failure that harms the attackers instead.

Fitzgerald eventually discovers that Brink possesses mysterious “psi units” capable of altering probability and preventing acts of violence from succeeding. Seeing an opportunity to stop the racketeer, the two men confront him, leading to a darkly humorous showdown in which his violent plans repeatedly backfire—with enough injured criminals that the ambulance has to make two trips.

"Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald found a package before his door that morning, along with the milk. He took it inside and opened it. It was a remarkably fine meerschaum pipe, such as the sergeant had longed irrationally to own for many years. There was no message with it, nor any card. He swore bitterly."

According to Project Gutenberg, The Ambulance Made Two Trips is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright was not renewed. Extensive research found no evidence of a copyright renewal for the story after its original publication in 1960, allowing the work to be freely reproduced and distributed in the United States.