Warm

Anders is going on a date with Judy, and he's terrified. Not of rejection, but of the voice that has taken up residence inside his skull, whispering impossible things about the nature of existence. The voice strips away the comfortable illusion of other people, reducing them to abstract patterns, gestalts, hollow forms that might not even be real. As Anders moves through his evening, each interaction becomes a test: Can he still love her when she has become nothing but geometry? Can he find his way back to the simple animal pleasure of wanting someone, when something ancient and cold watches from behind his eyes? Sheckley wrote this in 1953, but it feels like it was written last week, by someone who understood that the real horror isn't monsters, it's the suspicion that nothing outside your own mind has any solidity at all. For readers who like their science fiction philosophical, their love stories haunted, and their short fiction packing novels' worth of dread into twenty pages.