George O. Smith 46 min read

Consulting engineer Tom Lionel wakes not knowing the day or month or where he's 'been', a man who blacks out into himself, and returns to find his chess game moved and trouble waiting.

George O. Smith's 1946 story is a clever hard-SF and social-SF tale. Sharp, ingenious golden-age SF. Read it for an inventive story of a man sharing his own mind with another intelligence, told with Smith's characteristic engineering wit and puzzle-craft, in a well-turned golden-age piece about the strange partnership inside a single skull.

In its time

Published in 1946, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

46 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Swenson