Stephen Barr 37 min read

Precise physics teacher Howard Dax, exasperated to the point of snapping his chalk, turns to find one particular pupil, a thin, long-haired boy, still at his desk, concealing something intense.

Stephen Barr's 1962 story is a sharp first-contact and psi-powers tale. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a well-turned story where a teacher's irritation with a strange, gifted student opens onto something far stranger, in a quietly menacing golden-age piece that finds the uncanny in an ordinary classroom and an ordinary boy.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Burns