The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mightiest Man, by Patrick Fahy

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Title: The Mightiest Man

Author: Patrick Fahy

Release Date: May 23, 2007 [EBook #21582]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MIGHTIEST MAN ***

Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Tamise Totterdell and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

This e-text was produced from "Worlds of If" November 1961.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.

He had betrayed mankind, but he was not afraid of the
consequences--ever!

THE
MIGHTIEST
MAN

By PATRICK FAHY

They caught up with him in Belgrade.

The aliens had gone by then, only a few shining metal huts in the
Siberian tundra giving mute evidence that they had been anything other
than a nightmare.

It had seemed exactly like that. A nightmare in which all of Earth stood
helpless, unable to resist or flee, while the obscene shapes slithered
and flopped over all her green fields and fair cities. And the awakening
had not brought the reassurance that it had all been a bad dream. That
if it had happened in reality, the people of Earth would have been
capable of dealing with the terrible menace. It had been real. And they
had been no more capable of resisting the giant intelligences than a
child of killing the ogre in his favorite fairy story.

It was an ironic parallel, because that was what finally saved Earth for
its own people. A fairy story.

The old fable of the lion and the mouse. When the lion had exhausted his
atomic armor and proud science against the invincible and immortal
invaders of Earth--for they could not be killed by any means--the mouse
attacked and vanquished them.

The mouse, the lowest form of life: the fungoids, the air of Earth
swarming with millions of their spores, attacked the monstrous bodies,
grew and entwined within the gray convolutions that were their brain
centers. And as the tiny thread-roots probed and tightened, the aliens
screamed soundlessly. The intelligences toppled and fell, and at last
that few among them who retained sanity