Read Nightmares & Geezenstacks for Free Online Page A

Hickendorf’s excellent mathematics, was as near as matters to infinite.
    The field was also completely impervious to any degree of heat and any quantity of radiation.
    Lieutenant Hickendorf decided that a man—or a woman or a child or a dog—enclosed in that force field could withstand the explosion of a hydrogen bomb at closest range and not be injured in the slightest degree.
    No hydrogen bomb had been exploded to that time, but at the moment he completed his device, the lieutenant happened to be on a ship, cruiser class, that was steaming across the Pacific Ocean en route to an atoll called Eniwetok, and the fact had leaked out that they were to be there to assist in the first explosion of a hydrogen bomb.
    Lieutenant Hickendorf decided to get lost—to hide out on the target island and be there when the bomb went off, and also to be there unharmed after it went off, thereby demonstrating beyond all doubt that his discovery was workable, a defense against the most powerful weapon of all time.
    It proved difficult but he hid out successfully and was there, only yards away from the H-bomb—after having crept closer and closer during the countdown—when it exploded.
    His calculations had been completely correct and he was not injured in the slightest way, not scratched, not bruised, not burned. But Lieutenant Hickendorf had overlooked the possibility of one thing happening, and that one thing happened. He was blown off the surface of the earth with much more than escape velocity. Straight out, not even into orbit. Forty-nine days later he fell into the sun, still completely uninjured but unfortunately long since dead since the force field had carried with it enough air to last him only a few hours, and so his discovery was lost to mankind, at least for the duration of the twentieth century.

GREAT LOST DISCOVERIES 3 –
Immortality
    The third great discovery, made and lost in the twentieth century was the secret of immortality. It was the discovery of an obscure Moscow chemist named Ivan Ivanovitch Smetakovsky, in 1978. Smetakovsky left no record of how he made his discovery or of how he mew before trying it that it would work, for the simple reason that it scared him stiff, for two reasons.
    He was afraid to give it to the world, and he knew that once he had given it even to his own government the secret would eventually leak through the Curtain and cause chaos. The U.S.S.R. could handle anything, but in the more barbaric and less disciplined countries the inevitable result of an immortality drug would be a population explosion that would most assuredly lead to an attack on the enlightened Communist countries.
    And he was afraid to take it himself because he wasn’t sure he wanted to become immortal. With things as they were even in the U.S.S.R.—not to consider what they must be outside it—was it really worth while to live forever or even indefinitely?
    He compromised by neither giving it to anyone else nor taking it himself, for the time being, until he could make up his mind about it.
    Meanwhile he carried with him the only dose of the drug he had made up. It was only a minute quantity that fitted into a tiny capsule that was insoluble and could he carried in his mouth. He attached it to the side of one of his dentures, so that it rested safely between denture and check and he would be in no danger of swallowing it inadvertently.
    But if he should so decide at any time he could reach into his mouth, crush the capsule with a thumbnail, and become immortal.
    He so decided one day when, after coming down with lobar pneumonia and being taken to a Moscow hospital, he learned from overhearing a conversation between a doctor and nurse who erroneously thought he was asleep, that he was expected to die within a few hours.
    Fear of death proved greater than fear of immortality, whatever immortality might bring, so, as soon as the doctor and the nurse had left the room, he crushed the capsule and swallowed its contents.
    He