Armageddon, 1970

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.


The welder turned off his torch with his left hand; he held the remains of his right before his face, turned it and stared at it (the blood coursing in little sluggish streams down the forearm, the charcoal that had been bone sifting off into the air, the flesh a greasy yellow-red mass like candle drippings), and he shook his head slowly, an expression of annoyed mortification on his face. It was as though he had cut himself while shaving, no more. He was simply piqued, when he should have been shrieking with horror and unendurable pain.

Alan and Brave ran to him. "My God, man," said Alan, shaken, "let me get you to infirmary."

The welder stood up. "That's all right, Dr. Rackham. I can go myself. This don't hurt." And then a curious look spread over his face, as if he had just recollected a lesson taught him long ago. "It don't hurt much," he amended. "I guess it's cauterized so bad I can't feel it yet. Don't you worry, sir, I can make it."

He walked away, perfectly steady, carrying the almost destroyed hand in front of his chest; and Alan was so dumbfounded he let him go.

The welder never reached the infirmary. No man saw him again, alive or dead.

So an hour thereafter someone took a shot at Alan Rackham. Since Brave had witnessed the accident too, and because neither of them could account for the shooting except in connection with that strange accident, it seemed stupid and pointless for an attempt to be made on Alan's life alone; especially when a grenade pistol, one of those lean evil handguns developed in 1959, would with one shot have cut an eight-yard-wide swath in everything before it and eliminated both of them. But there it was. They shot at Alan with an automatic—the bullet nicked across his chest and spoiled a blue coat that was practically new—and then they disappeared.

Alan's house, which he shared with Brave, was a four-room brick atop a knoll on the outskirts of the colony. It was a perfect bachelor establishment; the precipitron kept it free of dust and Brave's innate neatness overcame Alan's careless disregard of surroundings to the extent that dirty socks and unpressed trousers were not often to be met with lying in corners or hanging over the backs of chairs. Brave was a good everyday cook and Alan occasionally took a couple of hours off to chef up a New Orleans style banquet for two. The living room was lined with books and the plastiglassed-in lounging quarters in the rear held racks of pipes and a well-stocked bar. They were very comfortable there. It was only a ten-minute walk from Alan's laboratory, and four minutes' ride from the center of the colony.

The colony was called Project Star. It was located on Long Island, protected much as Oak Ridge had been in the '40s and '50s, and Project Bellona in the early '60s; with electrified fences, and soldiers carrying the latest weapons, and a ring of grotesque machinery all around it, comprised of radar detectors and great ack-ack guns and a number of generators that threw up a kind of primitive, partly-effective force field. The force field would stop any aircraft or at least cause it enough trouble to slow it down for the ack-ack.

Of course the artificial satellite, Albertus (named in honor of Dr. Einstein), kept a watchful telescope on Project Star. But in that year of 1970 it seemed to most men that all the caution and secrecy was overly dramatic. After the collapse of Soviet Russia a decade before, from internal causes precipitated by the successful fixing of the American-controlled satellite Albertus in the heavens, and after the almost Carthaginian peace imposed on Argentina when its dictator A-bombed London, the world had quieted down considerably. America was top dog in the nations and her supervision of the science of other countries left little possibility of successful attack or even of effective sabotage within the many colonies which worked on advancements in weapons and other civilized phenomena, and on space flight…………