American Science Fiction #41 — page 24: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

24 "painstaking craftsmanship, the endless ‘hours. of eye-destroying labour that had, produced’ suéh' “miéroscopit, ’per- OfEtion as’ Well as'at some ‘of ‘the follies with which men had _ attired themselves in the name of martial glory. z He recalled having read of an order, issued at the time of the Mexi- can War, that the collars of all officers in the United States Army should rise to the tips of the ears. It was scarcely surprising, he thought that. the Seminoles—clad virtually in nothing at all—should have been able to stale- mate an army thus uniformed in the steaming swamps of Florida. “They're great, aren’t they?” The voice came from a lower level, and the General looked down to meet the excited blue eyes of a curly-haired male moppet who could scarcely have been more than twelve. There was an aura of friendliness about the leather-jacketed-and-corduroyed youngster, a sharing of manifest in- terest, that pierced the hide of the old soldier. * We smiled back and said, “Quite wonderful,” and was briefly afraid his words had been too condescending. But the quick answering smile on the youngster’s face revealed that he had said the right thing. : He followed the lad’s rapt gaze to a shelf he had not yet studied. The name on its cardboard label read --MacReedy and as soon as he saw the tiny figures it supported, his interest became focused upon it ‘to the exclu- sion of all other shelves and_ their fascinating displays. ; MacReedy was very evidently a specialist. His subject was American soldiery, with its chief. emphasis on artillery—tfrom early Colonial times to the present. As one of the highest- ranking officers in the Ordnance De- ‘partment of the United States Army, the General’s critical interest was aroused, | tea ot ©. Were were the demi-culverins of the -Manhattan Dutch, the brass field- pieces and mortars of the French wars and the Revolution, the: hight horse artillery cannon ‘of the ‘Mexican and Civil: Wars,- along with - pear-shaped ‘Dahlgren. and: Parrot siege-guns; each ‘ piece with its crew of aimers, loaders, eecu nee <9 rammers and ammunition bearers, | mite guns that protected New York Here was the, crowbardike;.dyna- and Boston and Baltimore against — threatened British invasion during the Newfoundland fisheries disputes, back in the 1880’s; and the complex dis- — appearing cannon that followed them. Here was. the old standard three-inch — fieldpiece on which the General had — cut his own eyeteeth; here the French 75 and 155, long and short, and the =mammoth railway guns of World War {. Here was even a model of the postwar American . 75—the _ ill-fated cannon that had proved so accurate on the firing-range, and so utterly use- less after. a half-mile over a bumpy | road. Here were the weapons of World War Il, from M-7 105 self-propelled _ howitzer to the 240-millimetre tractor- borne cannon. And here were more the 120-millimetre recent weapons, radar-aimed anti-aircraft cannon; its — newer automatic 75-millimetre cousin; the new 90-millimetre turret-mount for the Walker Bulldog, the 105-gpf im the turret of its new heavy tank. HE General felt a stir of alain: 4 There had been a leak some- where; release on this model was not | scheduled for another month. He would have to report it, of course. Then he shrugged, inwardly. Leak or not there was small cause for alarm: They must long-since have managed — 1 to scroupze test-run photographs, jf not copies of the blueprints them-_— selves. Still, a leak was bad business with | the country so precariously balanced in a combustible world-situation, He — looked at the next weapon, the last in the line. Fe And froze ... Here was the XT-101, with its rear-_ mounted turret and twin dual-purpose automatic 75-millimetre cannon. Here was a weapon, complete, that had not been completed in actuality—there was trouble with the turret, of course, — there always was... : It couldn’t be—but. it was. -The — «General -discovered-that his mouth had , slackened ‘in surprise; he closed i _ Comicbooks. com.