Robert Sheckley 23 min read

On the planet Loray, Professor Carver dismisses his bodyguard's wild tale of a native healer who mended a hunter with his head half torn off, a panacea worth any price.

Robert Sheckley's 1959 story is a sharp, ironic first-contact satire. Clever, biting golden-age SF. Read it for vintage Sheckley, a greedy anthropologist's pursuit of an alien miracle cure, in a witty, mordant tale about exploitation and the sly wisdom of the exploited, where the universal panacea comes with a catch.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Goodman