A Stone and a Spear

Dr. Curtis Johnson and his wife Louise drive through Maryland to visit Dr. Hamon Dell, a brilliant biochemist who abandoned a military research post to become a truck farmer, and the trip quickly reveals a world where science, war, and conscience are locked in deadly conflict. At Dell's eerie farm, with its strange soil, exhausted laborer, and massive fertilizer truck, Curt finds the once-formidable scientist aged, battered, and deeply altered by whatever drove him from the biological warfare center. Over dinner, Dell denounces the moral corruption of science-for-war and refuses to help develop an antitoxin for a weapon he helped create, arguing that every new defense only fuels the next escalation. His warning is cut short by violent pain, and Curt soon discovers a hidden laboratory where silent men watch a cathode-ray screen tracing Dell's life slipping away. There, Tarron Sark reveals an astonishing truth: he and his companions are time travelers from a ruined future, where war, radiation, and aerosol pollution destroyed civilization. They believe scientists like Dell and Curt are pivotal to that catastrophe and must be stopped. As Curt learns that the real weapons are chemicals hidden in fertilizers that can alter minds through the food supply, the story becomes a grim warning about biological warfare, manipulated research, and the terrifying cost of treating human knowledge as a tool of destruction. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.