William Oberfield 12 min read

Half mad with thirst, bleeding from a hundred cuts, Winston Eberly runs and crawls from cover to cover under a clear and deadly sky, everything staked on the little box in his pocket, good old U-235.

William Oberfield's 1950 story is a tense first-contact and post-apocalyptic tale of a hunted man. Sharp, driven golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping story where a desperate survivor guards a precious cargo of uranium across a ravaged land, and the enormous word of the title changes everything.

In its time

Published in 1950, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

12 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Al McWilliams