wood, and the ruins of a very few outlying structures. Of
the moderately large population, there were six hundred
survivors.
Belogorsk was taken, its laboratories seized and impressed
into the service of the People’s Army of China—a euphe-
mism for the military strong-arm of the Peking dictator-
ship and its Japanese allies. Within a day, hover-trucks
had taxied Chinese troops into Svobodnyy and Shimano-
vsk, thereby effectively isolating one small sector of the
Soviet Union.
In this time, the Western Alliance had been making
preparations and issuing stern warnings to the Chinese,
who had ignored them imperiously, sparing no effort to
make it apparent that they considered the West with
scorn. The United Nations was petitioned by every
Western Alliance nation, and the world organization re-
plied by trade sanctions against China. These too were
laughed off. The land of the dragon was feeling its muscle
for the first time in many centuries, and its egotism threat-
ened to carry it to the brink of world destruction and
beyond. Yet the Alliance held off, well aware that the
electronic shield envisioned by Child and later torn from
Ms mind by my own extrasensory powers was reaching
midpoint in its hasty construction. There was no sense, the
strategists agreed, in helping to escalate a mini-war into a
major conflagration until our side was immune to attack
behind its shield generators and victory was assured the
West.
Two weeks after the start of the war, the Chinese were
still consolidating territorial gains, moving more troops
into the captured Russian territory. All the while, they
pointed to their Dragonfly and made lightly veiled threats.
They made false promises that this was all the land they
Wanted. And they followed such worthless assurances with
warnings that they could easily survive a nuclear-bacteri-
ological war, for their population was so much greater
than ours that it could not help but outlast us.
The Alliance, furious, bided time.
Then, unexpectedly, Japanese forces had landed on For-
mosa, coming in from the sea with destroyers and landing
craft. While the guns and the forces were aimed at China,
the back door was entered and the house secured by the
enemy. The Alliance forces quartered on that strategic
airbase were systematically slaughtered. Both the Chinese
and the Japanese denied having anything to do with it.
But reconnaissance planes reported Japanese ships, sans
the rising sun, harbored in the islands.
The following day, with even the peace criers united
behind the government, the crash force working to erect
electronic shields over all the strategic areas of the
Western Alliance, the last of the invisible shells of stretched
molecules in place and the generators backed with a
second set to prevent disaster, the Alliance declared war
on China and Japan.
We struck out with nuclear stockpiles at the major
industrial centers of both enemy nations. In hours, billions
in property and hundreds of thousands of lives were wiped
out in gushes of mile-high flame. The enemy was prepared
for this, and it retaliated with its own nuclear weaponry.
But the shields worked, the Alliance cities remained in-
tact. Again and again, the People’s Army rained missiles
upon points in Russia, Europe, and North America. Not
one of them did damage. Since all sides had long ago, for
obvious strategic reasons concerned with occupying cap-
tured territory, gone to the construction of “clean”
bombs, even the spill radiation did not kill people living in
the countryside beyond the shelter of the unseen domes of
molecules which had been stretched to stunningly large
dimensions, their surface tension curiously increased and
not decreased by that expansion.
In desperation, plague drops were made on the cities of
the Alliance, but even these did not penetrate. In the
countryside, people died, but even many of these were
saved by immunization teams from the cities. Property
damage, at this point, was zero.
The Chinese nuked the small, unprotected towns in a
final spasm of fury, but they had little firepower left.
The Japanese had already surrendered in order to pro-
tect what little unmolested lands the home islands still
contained.
The Chinese command center was discovered at last,
destroyed with a vengeance, and the war brought to and