Coffin For Two cover art

Coffin For Two

Love In A Borrowed Body

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Coffin For Two

Written by: Winston Marks
Narrated by: Scott Miller
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After three solitary years prospecting on Venus, Bill returns to Earth expecting familiar faces, old friends, and perhaps another chance with Gwen. The people are still there, but something is unmistakably wrong. Nearly everyone wears a small red star on the forehead, ordinary robots have disappeared, and Bill’s old friend Tommy suddenly possesses enough strength to toss him around without effort.

The explanation is stranger than anything Bill encountered on Venus. People have begun living through remarkably lifelike artificial bodies called proxies. Their real bodies remain protected inside sealed chambers nicknamed coffins, while their minds experience the outside world through synthetic duplicates that can bleed, feel pain, show emotion, and withstand punishment that would kill an ordinary person. The arrangement promises extraordinary longevity, but Bill isn’t convinced that spending his existence through an artificial substitute counts as living. Unfortunately, refusing to join everyone else leaves him dangerously vulnerable when Tommy decides Gwen belongs to him.

Coffin For Two appeared in the September 1955 issue of Imaginative Tales. Winston K. Marks turns a technological breakthrough into a fast, funny confrontation between an old-fashioned Venus prospector and a society that has rewritten its everyday rules. The story moves quickly, with Bill’s sarcastic narration giving its increasingly strange future an appealing comic edge.

Winston Kinney Marks (1915–1979) began publishing science fiction with “Mad Hatter” in Unknown in 1940 and “Manic Perverse” in Astounding in 1941. He returned to the field in force during the 1950s, publishing stories including “The Water Eater” and “Unbegotten Child” in Galaxy, along with “The Test Colony,” “Breeder Reaction,” “Forsyte’s Retreat,” “The Mind Digger,” and “The Deadly Daughters.”
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