I was of course delighted when I got your invitation to attend this meeting. And because of its theme I thought that perhaps a case from my medical practice would interest you.

It was in the middle of the 1970s when a colleague from the clinic phoned my sanatorium in the country and invited me to visit him and see a patient whom I could help.

‘How?’ I asked, presuming that I could not be better than the professor and his colleagues.

‘By answering him. You know, he seems to be talking to you. He seems to be hearing the voices of your literary hero, Captain Feather, out of your story “The Planet Kirké”. Could you please come as soon as possible?’

My sanatorium was situated fifty kilometres from Prague and I did not get to the old building of our clinic until the next morning. My colleague led me to an isolation room. There I saw a young man who stood in the middle of the place, supporting his body with both hands and scratching his hair with the right now and then, as apes do in the zoo.

‘Captain Feather?’ he asked me. ‘I have returned from the planet Kirké.’ And he gave some ape-like grunts. Now I have to admit that I really did write a sequence of stories about the cosmic adventures of the Captain, whom I called ‘Feather’ to stress his non-heroism. One of them really took place on the planet called Kirké, which was so well automated that its inhabitants didn't need to work at all. Therefore they slowly devolved back to apes and later to pigs.

‘You certainly didn't read my story properly,’ I answered, trying to argue in accordance with his delusion. ‘Planet Kirké was destroyed by the same Captain at the end of the story.’ He only laughed. I began to recognize him. It was that same boy, George M., who had visited me several times in the 1960s with his first clumsy translations of various stories by van Vogt. He did not want to admit his mistakes at that time, and had insisted that his work was of paramount importance, as van Vogt was entirely unknown in Prague in the first years of that decade.