John Berryman 48 min read

By the time he reaches the office he's jittery as a new bride, weak, irritable, and tailed all the way by an obvious telepath. In a world of mind-readers, a man must find a way to live.

John Berryman's 1961 story is a sharp psi-and-social-SF tale of coexistence between telepaths and ordinary men. Clever, gritty golden-age SF. Read it for a hard-boiled story about survival, resentment, and the uneasy modus vivendi of a mind-reading society.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

48 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

John Schoenherr