Charles E. Fritch 14 min read

Wearily, Dr. Rawlings pulls a large volume of Freud from the bookcase and draws out the amber bottle hidden behind it, a frustrated, drinking psychoanalyst on the edge of something strange.

Charles E. Fritch's 1954 story spins a wry first-contact and social-SF tale from a beleaguered head-doctor's practice. Clever, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a psychiatrist's ordinary office day opens onto a patient, and a truth, quite beyond the textbook.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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