The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ultimate Weapon, by John Wood Campbell

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Title: The Ultimate Weapon

Author: John Wood Campbell

Illustrator: Gerald McConnell

Release Date: December 10, 2007 [EBook #23790]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Cover Illustration:
JOHN W. CAMPBELL
THE ULTIMATE WEAPON

When star fights star,
is chaos the best defense?]

RED SUN RISING

The star Mira was unpredictably variable. Sometimes it was blazing,
brilliant and hot. Other times it was oddly dim, cool, shedding little
warmth on its many planets. Gresth Gkae, leader of the Mirans, was
seeking a better star, one to which his "people" could migrate. That
star had to be steady, reliable, with a good planetary system. And in
his astronomical searching, he found Sol.

With hundreds of ships, each larger than whole Terrestrial spaceports,
and traveling faster than the speed of light, the Mirans set out to move
in to Solar regions and take over.

And on Earth there was nothing which would be capable of beating off
this incredible armada--until Buck Kendall stumbled upon THE ULTIMATE
WEAPON.

JOHN W. CAMPBELL first started writing in 1930 when his first short
story, _When the Atoms Failed_, was accepted by a science-fiction
magazine. At that time he was twenty years old and still a student at
college. As the title of the story indicates, he was even at that time
occupied with the significance of atomic energy and nuclear physics.

For the next seven years, Campbell, bolstered by a scientific background
that ran from childhood experiments, to study at Duke University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote and sold science-fiction,
achieving for himself an enviable reputation in the field.

In 1937 he became the editor of _Astounding Stories_ magazine and
applied himself at once to the task of bettering the magazine and the
field of s-f writing in general. His influence on science-fiction since
then has been great. Today he still