The lead truck of a fast convoy stopped dead much faster than any brakes could have brought it to a halt. It was on the alternate route which was supposed to take it around the area where the mysterious rocket had fallen.
The two men in the lead truck were killed instantly, and the single man in the second truck was badly injured. The third truck was so far back that the driver had time to wrench the wheel over and slam into a deep ditch. The truck overturned, but the driver was uninjured. The other trucks managed to stop without serious injury.
The first man to reach the lead truck saw that the hood was curiously crumpled. The door was jammed, but he climbed up and flashed his light in the window. The heavy motor had crushed the two men where they sat. As yet he hadn’t seen what they had hit. He stood and flashed his light ahead. There was nothing there. He wondered if some sort of dud artillery shell had hit the truck dead center.
He walked up to look, and slammed into something solid. It was so unexpected that it knocked him down. He flashed his light and saw... nothing. By then several other men had come up to him. He warned them, and then advanced cautiously. His fingertips touched a smooth hard surface, a surface that was faintly warm to the touch. The other in men thought he was suffering from shock until he finally grabbed one of them and thrust him against the invisible wall. It was higher than they could reach and, at the deep ditch, it followed the contour so that there was no place to crawl under or measure the thickness of the obstacle.
They talked about it being some new sabotage device planted there by an invader patrol, but it was too far in the rear to have been so planted.
One of the men suggested that it might have something to do with the large rocket that had fallen in the area, but he was laughed down. The rocket was three miles away.
Their lights shone through the obstacle without any of the distortion of vision which would have indicated a glassy substance.
The man who had first discovered the obstacle lifted one of the Galton guns from a truck and, standing six feet from the barrier, held the gun at waist level and fired a prolonged burst. There was no danger of ricochet, because the heat generated by impact at that velocity turned the tiny slugs immediately from a solid to a gas. The gun made its high siren wail, and the area of impact glowed red-white with the hot gases. After the burst that point of the barrier was too hot to touch. When it had cooled, they were able to feel no scratch or dent on its surface, thus proving it to be a harder substance than any they had ever encountered.
They found a drum which contained tracer load, and one man took a gun back two hundred yards. He fired short bursts at a constantly increasing angle. A thousand feet above the road the thin white lines of the tracer slugs still stopped sharply at the barrier.
The convoy was reorganized and before they left, one man found white paint and slapped huge crosses on the invisible barrier to warn any subsequent convoy. He was subsequently commended for this foresight.
On pleasant days, Stanford Rider, the President of the United States, Supreme Commander of the United Forces of the Allied Nations, was permitted to board the silent elevator and ride, with his bodyguard, up the two-thousand-foot shaft to the observation room.
The observation room fronted on a sheer rock wall in one of the lesser peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. A powerful electric motor slid back the whole wall of the observation room; the wall was heavy because the outer surface of it was made of slabs of native rock.
Stanford Rider was a tall lean man with a pale, pouched face, sparse sandy hair and alert blue eyes. Years before, the lines in his face had accentuated his gift of laughter. But the years of war and danger, the constant threat of defeat, had sagged those lines into a continual moroseness, almost apathetic in its perpetual intensity.
His eyes brightened when he saw the blue of the sky, the misted purple of the far mountains. No three-dimensional color photography, no amount of synthetic sunlight could compensate for the reality he witnessed.
He knew that even as he had stepped into the elevator two thousand feet below, radar watch had been re-doubled and fighters had been sent up so high as to be invisible. Interceptor rockets lay fat and sleeping in the deep launching ramps, their dull stubborn noses shining metallically, their single-purpose brains ready to begin functioning at the first thrust of incredible acceleration.
He stood, his shoulders slumped, his arms hanging slack at his sides, looking at the sunlight through which he could not walk in freedom. Far below, in the warm guts of the inner earth, the nine-man War Council was in session. Later he would listen to the transcription after all repetitions and asides had been deleted. More decisions to be made. More lives to be lost. They were getting ever more anxious for him to launch another attack, impatient of the way he insisted on waiting for further development of the robot gun carriers.
He remembered the utter failure of the last attack, the horror and the agony of knowing that it had failed, and as he remembered, his mouth twisted. Yes, the attacking force had reached the sea, splitting the invader forces in half, but rocket supply had failed, they had been cut off and those who were not killed had been sent into slavery, the weapons they had carried being turned on their countrymen.
The potential attack was even more questionable in light of the odd new development in Advance Section Three. He puzzled over the report he had read. It was a war of technology, and he felt fear as he realized that the invader had created something beyond their ability to understand.
What was the name of the division commander? Oh, yes. Argo. Able man. He had sent in a very complete report. “The point of entrance of the large rocket appears to be the center point of a circular, transparent impenetrable barrier having a diameter of 9.14 miles. The surface of the barrier has a temperature of 88.1 degrees, and it accurately follows all ground contours. An attempt was made to tunnel under it, using the newest type mole, but at ninety feet below the surface, the mole struck the barrier and was unable to progress. Tests have indicated that the barrier reaches higher than the ceiling of any ship based here, but no attempt has yet been made to strike the barrier with a guided missile at stratosphere height, i.e. above one hundred miles. The vegetation inside the barrier appears to be parched, as though it had been subjected to great heat. It is surmised that certain civilian personnel may have been trapped inside the barrier, but close watch has disclosed no sign of them.
“The barrier appears to be impervious to all except light rays. Close watch with high power spotting scopes has indicated no activity within the area enclosed by the barrier. The thickness of the barrier is not accurately known. By close observation of the movement of dried grass just inside the barrier, it is believed to be extraordinarily thin, possibly less than an inch in thickness.
“No reasonable conjectures can be made. Morale within this section is suffering due to there being no official explanation of this phenomenon. Were such a barrier to be created so as to enclose some of our essential subterranean production facilities, our position would be seriously affected.
“Recommendations: 1. That the best scientific minds available be sent immediately to examine the barrier at first hand. 2. That an atomic bomb be placed so as to explode against the barrier.”
Yes, it was a good report. Within an hour or so, he would hear the report of the results of the atomic blast.