Of Stegner's Folly

by Richard S. Shaver

I went back to South America, to my reporting. I wanted to be on hand when the attack of which Tilda had warned became reality.

I was some twelve miles from the deadly circle when the giant tanks appeared. They were larger than any moving thing ever seen on Earth before. Tracklayers, caterpillars—and swinging above them slender towers which bore ominous gleaming nozzles. On they came.

Then they struck at us. From the nozzles a cold brilliance leaped out, unnamable, that swept forward like a slow lightning, a kind of crackling sheet of cold fire that spread from tower to tower, in an arc that began to bend toward our lines.

The fire came in mile-wide swaths. There was no outcry, no terror—just the sweating lines of men in foxholes, the crews about the guns, heaving ammo into their maws; the rumbling trucks and the careening jeeps. The fire swept over all like liquid, radiance, like a pouring out of moonlight, soft but brilliant, mild yet deadly. Then it was gone. And when it had gone, nothing but silence remained. Dead men stretched out where they had lain waiting, fallen where they labored; jeeps careened on to crash into stumps or bigger trucks—and stop forever. Only silence and death and nothingness was left.

When the silence swept across the whole front I dropped my glasses and lit out for my own car, and headed for the coast. I wanted to file this story in person, and I knew, too, that army would not be there in the morning. I meant to stay alive. I knew that the hope for mankind lay in what honest men were doing with Stegner's formulae. I had to know. So I fled.

Next day they were dropping atom bombs on every moving thing in Stegner's ghastly Eden. High flying bombers flew in swarms—and many of them were being shot down by the weird fire. I saw those atom bombs falling, on television, and the white radiance reaching up toward them. I saw it catch them in its embrace, saw them explode harmlessly in the air, midway in their plunge. Whatever the fire was, it was a defense against the atom bomb, for it exploded them before they could reach their targets.

It didn't catch them all, and it didn't intercept all the high-flying bombers loosing their guided rocket missiles. It got enough though, to show us we were on the losing end. What we needed was a miracle. And the miracle did occur....

At first, even with my fingers on every tag end of information that came out of the terrible area, it was an unnoticeable change. Then I got it. The men doing our fighting changed in caliber and ability. I never learned, due to the official habit of hushing everything up, just whose technology accomplished the miracle, but it must have been started from the first, with those army officers who had listened to me with such lack of interest when I spoke before their inquisition at the Texas army air field.

All I learned was that there was a new kind of man busy at the front, a man of keener intellect, swifter of action, infinitely more able than the former ordinary soldier.

It was Jake who first confirmed my suspicions. He brought in photographs of men lifting trucks out of mudholes, men tearing steel cables apart with their bare hands, men jumping over twenty-foot barriers with full pack. "Whatta I do with that kind of pic? The people are so fed up with the impossible news they are getting that they don't believe anything any more! But you and I know a news camera doesn't lie ... it doesn't have time!"