James R. Hall 14 min read

After a lifetime of routine medical exams, a man senses the little dull pains nibbling like mice at every corner of his brain.

James R. Hall's 1963 story sits with Lee through a checkup that clears him for some mysterious scheduled procedure, even as he registers a creeping wrongness inside his own skull. Unsettling social SF that builds dread from the machinery of ordinary medicine. Read it for a quietly disturbing magazine story about identity and the question its title asks.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

14 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Leo Summers