Winston K. Marks 18 min read

Strapped, drugged, and supine on a narrow bucket-couch, Peter Duncan is miserably, continuously sick as the Mars-bound ship veers and corrects to dodge meteorites in the crowded emptiness of space.

Winston K. Marks's 1954 story is a colorful colonization and psi-powers tale. Sharp, engaging golden-age SF. Read it for a story that opens amid the queasy misery of interplanetary travel and unfolds a strange mystery of memory, where the geisha of the title haunts a man light-years from Earth.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Herman B. Vestal