Roger D. Aycock 9 min read

'Maybe Ragan won't turn up, maybe we've still got a man out there to bring the ship back,' says the Coordinator, as a psych team drugs the returned crewman to relive the flight in detail.

Roger D. Aycock's 1961 story is a tense, probing first-contact and social-SF tale. Sharp, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a story where investigators drug a returned spaceman to relive a fateful voyage, seeking the source of a feeling that may reveal something about human nature no one has ever known.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Jack Gaughan