Robert Hoskins 28 min read

The boy is twelve and running for his life, half a dozen pursuers pounding the summer blacktop behind him, until he darts into an alley and realizes, too late, it's a dead end.

Robert Hoskins's 1962 story is a taut social-SF and time-travel tale that opens on a desperate chase. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a hunted boy's flight into a blind alley proves to be the beginning of something far stranger than a schoolyard beating.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

28 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Leo Summers