Rog Phillips' "The Yellow Pill" (short story, hallucinations, free)
Dr Cedric Elton, a well known psychiatrist, has got a new patient - Gerald Bocek. Bocek is brought by four cops. He "had shot and killed five people in a supermarket, and had killed one officer and wounded two others before being captured." But Bocek claims "that the people he had killed were not people at all, but blue-scaled Venusian lizards who had boarded his spaceship, and that he had only been defending himself"!!
During the various sessions with doctor, he will claim that he is not Gerald Bocek but Jerry Bocek, that the doctor is not a psychiatrist but his friend Gar Castle, that both of them are not in doctor's office but aboard a spaceship, ... - a lot of nonsense.
After several sessions, the patient begins really getting on doctor's nerves, & doctor needs to give "the yellow pill" treatment to ...
Fact sheet.
First published: Astounding, October 1958.Rating: A.
Download full text from Internet Archive.
Listed among the stories from John Campbell's Astounding/Analog.
Included among the SciFiction's classics.
3 comments:
Hello, I used to have this excellent story on an old VHS.....I would LOVE to have that again ! Does anyone out there know where I can get this as a DVD or VHS ?
The adaptation you had was likely from the BBC television series "Out of the Unknown." The BBC now sells a DVD set with all available episodes of that series.
It was one of the episodes which was lost and has been reconstructed using extant audio and photo stills.
If anyone still has copies...vhs or otherwise...of this or other missing episodes, please contact the BBC or some other film preservationist!
I am currently watching Out of the Unknown and it is quite excellent, non-compromising authentic
SF. Indeed, the first 3 (of 4) seasons were all adaptations of classic stories.
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