Rog Phillips 1 hr 11 min read

Working an example in multiple integration at the blackboard before forty-three watching students, Professor John Henderson simply vanishes, leaving only a wristwatch and a belt buckle on the floor.

Rog Phillips's 1953 story is a clever psi-powers and social-SF tale. Sharp, intriguing golden-age SF. Read it for a well-built mystery that opens on an impossible disappearance witnessed by a whole classroom and unfolds toward a science-fictional explanation, in a well-turned golden-age piece of puzzle and payoff about faith, doubt, and hidden powers.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

1 hr 11 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Tom Beecham