Defense Mech
A man named Halloway is a million miles from Earth, shooting toward Mars, and his mind is breaking apart from terror. The vastness of space has cracked open something primal in him, a screaming need to flee, to go back, to be anywhere but here, suspended in the black void between worlds. When conventional methods fail, the ship's psychiatrist employs an experimental defense mechanism to shield Halloway from his own panic. The treatment works, but at what cost? Bradbury strips away the glamour of space exploration to expose the raw psychological warfare happening inside one man's skull. This is early Bradbury at his most unflinching: less lyrical than his later classics, more visceral, more concerned with the damage we do to ourselves to survive the universe. For readers who want their science fiction to hurt.
