The Counterfeit Man

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The Counterfeit Man (ISBN 0234777710) is a collection of science fiction short stories by Alan E. Nourse, published in 1963 by Scholastic. Several of the stories have a medical or psychological theme:

• "The Counterfeit Man" - The onboard doctor of an exploratory spaceship returning from Ganymede determines the crew has been infiltrated by at least one malicious shapeshifting alien. He attempts to force the intruders, who can almost perfectly mimic hunan physiology, to betray themselves. Succeeding with one, he sabotages the ship to temporarily strand it in Earth orbit, going ahead in a shuttle to order a quarantine. When the entire crew is accounted for, he storms into the ship to search it, only to be ambushed and killed by the remaining alien, who has taken on his own guise.
• "The Canvas Bag" - A drifter with only a vague recall of his own past stops in a town and falls in love, which prompts him to examine his memories and realize that he is over 150 years old. Having sworn at his mother and his home, he cannot settle down, cursed with an irresistible compulsion to wander the Earth for 1000 years. The girl he loved chases him down and chooses to wander with him.
• "An Ounce of Cure" - a short satyrical piece on Nourse's own medical profession: a middle-aged man goes to his doctor for foot pain and is trapped in a maelstrom of arcane diagnostic procedures and endless referrals to increasingly ridiculous specialists. Eventually he gives up on medicine and goes to a mystic guru.
• "The Dark Door" - a former psychological experimenter, trapped in deeply paranoid persecution fantasies, appeals to his former mentor for help. The mentor instead imprisons him in a VR device and subjects him to a series of psychotic delusions, all in order to force him to rediscover the vital finding he had uncovered during his earlier experimteal work, which may be what had driven him insane to begin with.
• "Meeting of the Board" - another satire, this one of a future in which American industry is compromised by workers purchasing ownership of their companies through stock, mismanaging them and mistreating management until it goes on strike itself, refusing to manage any longer.
• "Circus" - a very human-like alien is stranded on Eath, and tries to convince Earthlings that he is an actual extraterrestrial. Unfortunately the only human who believes him is an SF writer, who gently informs the visitor that no one else would find him credible on the subject.
• "My Friend Bobby" - distubing story told in first person by a young boy who can read minds. His father is mostly absent, and his mother hates and fears him, his only companion being his collie Bobby, with whom he has formed a telepathic link.
• "The Link" - a cultured, beautiful alien society has spent millennia one step ahead of "the Hunters," their long-separated militaristic cousins with whom they once fought a war on their mutual homeworld. A young man and woman elect to stay behind on a world being abandoned to meet the pursuers face to face for the first time in ages, in order to sue for peace. An "Adam and Eve" story.
• "Image of the Gods" The hardscrabble human colony on Baron IV is informed that Earth has undergone a regime change for the worse, and that they must accept a new military governor whose first act is to unreasonably increase their agricultural-export quota. The colonists refuse and resist, with the unexpected aid of Baron IV's primitive but helpful alien autochthones, the Dusties, who - they learn - have come to worship them as gods.
• "The Expert Touch" - a reluctant experimental subject is tricked by his doctor into battling his inner demons in order to find the key to human sanity; the ordeal leaves him perfectly sane, but highly unhelpful.
• "Second Sight" - a young woman is the only true psychic on Earth, but is also deaf and blind, all of her senses being entirely psionic. She is pressured to take part in an experiment to induce her powers in other similarly handicapped people.