Noel M. Loomis 20 min read

The Bryd wakes with a rude jolt: something terrible is churning in Dale Stevenson's mind, and the mental turmoil makes its unseen passenger most uncomfortable, five thousand miles above the Earth.

Noel M. Loomis's 1951 story is a clever, wry first-contact and social-SF tale told partly from an alien mind-rider's view. Sharp, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where an ancient body-hopping entity finds humans exasperatingly unstable, just as its host is about to break the shackles of gravity.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Herman B. Vestal