Office Call

Dr. Rawlings, a weary psychiatrist with a secret taste for whiskey and a private dream of escaping to a chicken farm, is already worn down by impossible patients when his glamorous receptionist, Miss Austin, ushers in yet another case. He expects the usual madness, but Charles T. Moore, a young mathematician, brings him something far stranger than delusion. As Rawlings recalls earlier patients whose claims seemed absurdly close to the truth, Moore calmly explains a theory that any point in space can open into another universe, making interplanetary travel possible. What begins as a skeptical interview turns increasingly uncanny. Moore insists his equations have become real through mind control, and that he has crossed into other worlds himself. One night, he says, he opened his door to find a baby in a basket on Mars; the child then became a full-grown nude woman with six fingers on each hand, and he has been unable to help her adapt to Earth. He brought her to Rawlings for treatment, only for the psychiatrist to realize she is the very "woman from Mars" he once dismissed. Blending comic exasperation, romance, and science-fiction absurdity, the story pits stubborn skepticism against a universe where the impossible keeps arriving in the waiting room. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.