George O. Smith 1 hr 6 min read

Cal Blair keeps to the center of the Solarian Medical Association's laboratory, as far as he can from the shelves of dangerous bottles and the preserved human viscera on the walls.

George O. Smith's 1945 story opens uneasily amid clinical menace before its psi-and-space-opera premise unfolds. Sharp, inventive golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a visit to a medical laboratory becomes the doorway to a mystery of the mind and identity.

In its time

Published in 1945, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

1 hr 6 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).