Giants From Eternity

Manly Wade Wellman

Imagine the world facing a menace unlike any we have ever known or dreamed of before — a blight from outer space against which all our scientific skill seems useless. Imagine, also, that a means has been found to bring back to life the greatest scientists who ever lived — giants from eternity! But there are limits to this boon: only five of the great minds of the past can be restored to us. Which five would you choose? It all started when a meteor landed in Kansas and people awoke to find a small area covered with a horrid, pulsing red substance which engulfed and devoured everything in its path and spread outward in all directions. They dug ditches and the blight merely flowed into the ditches, slowly feeding off the soil as it moved. They set fires around it, and the blight moved in and lapped up the fuel under the fires putting them out. Some substances resisted longer than others; it fed upon anything alive with terrible rapidity, but took longer to absorb metal or glass — but absorb these things it did. Could it be destroyed at all? Could it even be contained within the area it had already conquered? Oliver Norfleet, Spencer DuPogue, and Canis Bridge were among those who tackled the problem; and it was through a nearly fatal accident that Norfleet discovered a process whereby the dead could be restored. Norfleet saw that here was a way in which help could be obtained from the greatest scientific minds the world had ever known; the great natural philosophers of the past, their talents undirected by the accumulation of procedures and rules which their very discoveries had set up, might be able to bring to this problem the freshness of viewpoint which was so sorely needed. Norfleet had the means of restoring five giants from eternity. But which five? Who would you have selected if you had been the one to choose? You’ll find the answer to this question in this gripping and warmly human novel by the same author of “Twice in Time.”