“I had about decided the same thing about the smaller a creature. We may have to fumigate that old mountain mess.”
“Oh, you can’t harm us. We’re too powerful. But we can obliterate you in an instant.”
“Hah!”
“Say ‘Hah, sir’ when you address me. Do you know the place in the mountain that is called Sodom?”
“I know the place. It was caused by a large meteor.”
“It was caused by one of these.”
What he held up was the size of a grain of sand. Marshal could not see it in detail.
“There was another city of you bug-eyed beasts there,” said the small martinet. “You wouldn’t know about it. It’s been a few hundred years. We decided it was too close. Now I have decided that you are too close.”
“A thing that size couldn’t crack a walnut.”
“You floundering fop, it will blast this town flat!”
“What will happen to you?”
“Nothing. I don’t even blink for things like that.”
“How do you trigger it off.”
“You gaping goof, I don’t have time to explain that to you. I have to get to Washington.”
It may be that Marshal did not believe himself quite awake. He certainly did not take the threat seriously enough. For the little man did trigger it off.
When the final count was in, High Plains did not have the highest percentage gain in population in the nation. Actually it showed the sharpest decline, from 7313 to nothing.
They were going to make a forest preserve out of the place, except that it has no trees worthy of the name. Now it is proposed to make it the Sodom and Gomorrah State Park from the two mysterious scenes of desolation there, just seven miles apart.
It is an interesting place, as wild a region as you will ever find, and is recommended for the man who has seen everything.
Colophon
Short Fiction
was compiled from short stories and novellas published between 1960 and 1962 by
R. A. Lafferty.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Matic Likar,
and is based on transcriptions produced between 2007 and 2020 by
Robert Cicconetti, Irma Spehar, Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan, V. L. Simpson, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg.
The cover page is adapted from
Homage to Apollinaire,
a painting completed in 1912 by
Marc Chagall.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
January 27, 2021, 12:30 a.m.
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