Tom Purdom 42 min read

In a beer hall on the eighty-first floor of the Hotel Mark Twain, fourteen men hold an adolescent girl prisoner, and Sordman, the most powerful psionic Talent in the world, says he'll go up alone.

Tom Purdom's 1960 story is a tense psi-powers and social-SF thriller of a superhuman adept. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a taut story where the world's mightiest psychic, able to make anyone do anything, is drawn into the orbit of a madman's mind he cannot simply overpower.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Wallace Wood