Kris Neville 21 min read

Sick and helpless with liguna fever, he is lucky to have a faithful native woman nursing him with dark, syrupy medicine. Or is he?

Kris Neville's 1952 story builds creeping unease from a stranded man, an incurable alien disease, and the caretaker at his bedside. Sharp, atmospheric psi-and-social SF. Read it for a taut tale where the question isn't whether the patient will recover, but what his nurse really intends.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Karl Rogers