Come Home From Earth

By EDMOND HAMILTON

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Thrilling Wonder Stories February 1947. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

They will be condemning Doctor Dixon's experiment, by now. He'll be blamed for what happened to me. The newspapers will yelp, "Young Scientist Loses Mind As Result of Rash Experiment!"

They will be wrong. I didn't lose my mind. It would be much truer to say that my mind lost me.

Let me go back. I was Fred Ellis, thirty years old, instructor in psychology at Midwestern University. At least, that's who I thought I was!

Doctor Francis Dixon, head of our department, was a dark, keen, brilliant man who was out of place in those poky classrooms. But he and John Burke, the assistant professor, carried on much private research.

Dixon's work was usually way over my head. His ideas were brilliant, if unconventional. Burke, a blond young giant with a strong faculty of imagination, understood him better than I did. I was the plodding, patient type of scientist, I'm afraid.

But I intensely admired Dixon and listened with deep interest to his theories and suggestions. One night, talking with Burke, he came out with the most daring suggestion of all.

Burke had made the trite remark that "mind is just a function of the physical body, after all."

"How do we know it is?" Dixon demanded. "All good little modern psychologists repeat that, but how do we know? It may be that mind and body are wholly different individual entities."

Burke gaped at him. "But that's going back to old-fashioned nonsense. How could mind and body be different entities?"

"Ever go deep-sea fishing?" Dixon asked him unexpectedly.

"Fishing?" repeated Burke.

"Down off Florida you catch big sharks and sea-bass that have remoras, or sucker-fish, a foot long solidly attached to their sides. The remora is part of the shark, yet they're different entities.

"Termites have flagellates in their body who digest the wood the termites eat. Leguminous plants live in 

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