The Unwilling Professor

What if two failing college students kidnapped an alien professor to force him to tutor them in calculus? That's the delightfully absurd premise of Arthur Porges's 1950s comedy. Fatty Schultz and Irv Lece are academic disasters, each tumbling toward mathematical doom in their own spectacular way. Then they stumble upon a crashed spacecraft and its passenger: Professor Iglowt P. Slakmak, a rabbit-like creature from Venus. The students do what any rational young men would do in this situation - they tie him up in a cabin and demand he teach them calculus. Miraculously, it works. Their grades improve. Their fraternity brothers celebrate. But the professor, quite reasonably, is less thrilled about his captivity. When a friendly Martian dog named Hotspur arrives to stage a rescue, our heroes finally face the music. Porges writes with a wink and a grin, skewering college life and academic pretension with cheerful irreverence. It's lightweight, it's silly, and it's exactly the kind of harmless fun that made golden age science fiction so enjoyable.