Big Pill

Big Pill

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Big Pill by Raymond Z. Gallun

Published:

1952

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Big Pill

By

3
(1 Review)
Child, it was, of the now ancient H-bomb. New. Untested. Would its terrible power sweep the stark Saturnian moon of Titan from space ... or miraculously create a flourishing paradise-colony?

Book Excerpt

from civilization as this. Come on, we can't do a thing about it right now."

* * * * *

Double rage and grief drove him on toward what he must do with greater insistence than before. With a key from his hip-pouch, he opened the airlock of the Prometheus. With great caution they went inside but found no one in the ship.

The mood of its interior was brooding and sullen. Every cubic foot of space not taken up by its machinery and fuel was packed with black ingots of an alloy, a large proportion of which was fissionable metal, quiescent now, and harmless, but under the right kind of primer, capable of bursting into a specialized hell of energy. Five thousand tons of the stuff, Earth-weight!

But even all this was the secondary part of the purpose for which the Prometheus had been fitted. Bert and Alice followed a narrow catwalk to a compartment along the keel of the ship which was fitted like a huge bomb-bay. And the monster that rested there, gripped by mechanically op

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Coming from 1952, this idea of one-shot terraforming is surprisingly original. The science is a bit iffy when it gets to shortening the half-lives of radiation, but it's an adventure story, complete with an evil corporation sabotaging the plan.

The story is mainly plot. The two-fisted main character and his scrappy wife don't go in for a lot of philosophic introspection. That's another way of saying characterization is weak. But it's not a bad pulp story