The History of Science Fiction Magazine - Part Two by Michael Ashley

Author:Michael Ashley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

The Story

The Dead Spot came on May 8,1940. One day the land had been golden with the harvest of wheat. The next, in a circle that covered ten thousand square miles of Kansas and Nebraska, there was only death.

It happened at dusk. A brief purple glare lit the sky. All who had seen it felt a burning of the skin, a leaden ache in the bones, a torturing thirst. And they died – hideously.

Medical skill was useless; doctors fell with the rest. The corpses crumbled to a gray, heavy ash, that no wind could stir. Dwellings and barns and wheat, rotted by the incredible decay that attacked all organic matter, fell to heaps of dust. It was curiously luminous by night, and the sun rose upon a flat gray waste of leprous doom.

Its edge was queerly sharp. And all who ventured beyond the barrier, even planes flying high above, instantly fell. The whole world was appalled by this inexplicable cancer on the planet that teleview reporters named the Dead Spot. What had happened? What if it happened again? Seeking an answer to those harrowing questions, the President called Congress into emergency session.

No relief was needed, for no survivors had come from the murdered land. Science failed to explain what had desolated it. The perplexed legislators ended by creating the Special Secret Service.

Seeking a chief for the SSS, the President sent for a man who had been on the bottom of the Pacific on the catastrophic night. Ryeland Ames, then only twenty-five, was already twice famous for daring deep-sea explorations in the benthosphere of his own design, and for startling success in smashing the atom with his own super-cyclotron.

A tanned, rugged six-footer, with stiff, tangled red hair and level blue eyes, Ames walked into the executive office and listened soberly.

‘I'll do anything I can, Mr. President,’ he said. ‘But there are older men than I am, better trained. Rathbone, for instance, is the best radiation physicist in the world.’

‘Rathbone is in the hospital,’ said the President, “not expected to recover. He was injured in an experiment that went wrong.’ His eyes leapt back to the lean scientist-explorer. ‘No, you’re the man for the job, Ames. The Dead Spot swallowed two hundred thousand people. If the thing happens again, it may take two million – or the whole world, for all we know! Your job is to find what it is, and stop it.’

Thank you, Mr. President,’ said Ryeland Ames. ‘I’ll do my best.’

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