ARMAGEDDON, 1970
By Geoff St. Reynard
As atomic weapons from space laid waste to
Earth's cities, Alan Rackham searched for the
traitors. Was it possible he sought himself?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
October 1952
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
They tried to kill Alan Rackham about an hour after he had seen the accident. They bungled the job. They shot at him from ambush—with an ordinary automatic pistol—as he was walking up to his house; and Brave, who had a sixth sense for danger which never failed him, knocked Alan over at the very instant of the shot and sprawled across him, a great solid shield holding him down and protecting him despite his angry wrigglings. Brave's grenade pistol was in his hand before the two of them hit ground, and he sent four quick shots at the bushes, spaced so that the tiny hot fragments tore hell out of thirty yards of shrubbery. Nobody yelled or groaned. Brave waited a full minute, and then he rose cautiously, so that Alan could sit up and brush himself off and swear as he spat out dirt. They went into the house and Alan reported the assassination attempt to his immediate superior, Dr. Getty. After that they didn't try again to kill Alan for a long time.
The accident had been uncanny. It happened in the room where the shells of the silver-colored disks were fitted together and welded, before they were sent to the gargantuan baths that half-melted them again to rechill them into solid masses of metal which nothing short of a direct hit by a blockbuster would crack.
A welder, using one of the newly-developed torches that made the old ones seem like match-flares by comparison, dropped it accidentally. Its flame licked up and sprayed across the man's right hand. It melted the protective glove like ice cream on a stove; crisped away the skin and liquefied the flesh, charred the bones black and left the welder no more than half a palm and two fingers before he could jerk his hand out of the terrible blast of fire.
Alan and Brave were standing about twelve feet off, and there could be no mistake as to what they saw then.