It was, as usual, a decision on which the question of peace or atomic war depended. The Council of the Western Defense Alliance, as usual, had made the decision. And, as usual, the WDA Coordinator had to tell the Com Ambassador that the Coms had won again. The WDA would not risk atomic war over a minor boundary. Some hundreds of light-years away, the Survey ship Lotus floated in space over the third planet of the system, a planet exactly like Earth, only there was absolutely NO life on it.
Joe had helped launch the first Space Platform--that initial rung in man's ladder to the stars. But the enemies who had ruthlessly tried to destroy the space station before it left Earth were still at work. They were plotting to stop Joe's mission!
Was it a wild talent that MacReedy had, or was it just prophetic genius that led him to figure out new, improved ordnance weapons and make models of them--before the armed forces had them? Whichever it was, MacReedy was both valuable and dangerous--and when the general saw MacReedy's final figure, the weapons following the mobile rocket A-missile launcher....
Tomorrow's technocracy will produce more and more things for better living. It will produce other things, also; among them, criminals too despicable to live on this earth. Too abominable to breathe our free air.
It's been said that the act of creation is a solitary thing--that teams never create; only individuals. But sometimes a team may be needed to make creation effective....
Where are we going? What will the world be like in the days--perhaps not too distant--when we have tested and tested the bombs to the finite degree? Joe L. Hensley, attorney in Madison, Indiana, and increasingly well known in SF, returns with this challenging story of that Tomorrow.
Sometimes an organizational setup grows, sets its ways, and becomes so traditional that once-necessary jobs become unnecessary. But it is sometimes quite hard to spot just which man is the unnecessary one. In this case. not the one you think!