: The Enormous Word by Oberfield William McWilliams Al Illustrator - Science fiction; Short stories; War stories; Human-alien encounters Fiction; Torture Fiction; Nuclear weapons Fiction

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THE ENORMOUS WORD

The blue men had ravaged Terra and reduced Winston Eberly to a contemptible insect. Now here he was, complaining of indigestion!

Hurry! Hurry! Run as fast as you can go to the big tree! Crouch beneath its branches and hide, staring up through its open spaces to see if anything is glinting in the clear sky. Anything there? Oh God, yes! No, it's only a bird, a small cloud drifting. Now! Dash madly, crawl on your belly, fight on to the next place of concealment!

Winston Eberly knew he was talking to himself, but he didn't give a damn. He was sweating and sick from exertion, half mad with burning thirst and bleeding from an unknown number of cuts and scratches, but that didn't matter either. The only thing that had any real meaning or value was the stuff in the box in his pocket.

He slapped the pocket with a dirt-encrusted hand. "Good old box! Good old U-235!" he mumbled feverishly. "You'll pull us out of this mess we're in. You'll show the blasted men from space they're not playing with children!"

Pausing in shadows he looked again at the sky. All blue and quiet. Nothing stirring up there, nothing glinting. But they were there all right; they were always there. Maybe they were in the stratosphere, maybe above it, or about to streak low across the sky from horizon to horizon in the twinkling of an eye.

Men from space. Hateful, sadistic, repulsive men from outer space! Oh, how overbearing they were; how greedy and cruel and how sure of themselves! They had reason to be confident, of course. They had simply stood far off in space and shrouded the entire world in a terrible radiation that brought unconsciousness to all and death to many. And something in that radiation had sought out every particle of refined Uranium and Hiroshimaized the world.

One had to respect that power, if not admire it. Even now, they could bring quick death to every single Earthman by simply pressing a button somewhere in their one established city, in the Sahara Desert. Clever. It seemed they could do anything. Why wouldn't electric and internal combustion motors run since the coming of the space men? More important, how could their high-flying ships detect even the slightest unauthorized action on the ground below?

They had the world in their power, right enough, and even darkness brought the Earthmen no chance to strike back. The invaders called their ships back to the Sahara at dusk and at dusk all good little Earthmen went to bed, or went strangely to sleep where they stood.

Eberly called an end to his watchful reflections and darted into the open again like a frightened doe. This was the only chance and here, between the hidden place where determined men had worked tirelessly and ingeniously to refine only a small capsule of pure Uranium in a year and the hidden place where other learned men waited to incorporate the product into an atomic bomb that could destroy the city of the invaders completely, lay the greatest danger of defeat.

As he stumbled on toward his goal he cursed the power that made all modern conveyances impossible. This snail's pace across open country, under the cosmic microscope of the alien invaders, was maddening, with so much at stake. But it was no more so than the task of mining and refining ore or that of constructing an atomic bomb without the aid of modern machinery, no more so than being forced to live practically like wild animals as all must now do.

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