Short Story
The Devil of the Western Sea
- by Philip M. Fisher
- in Argosy, 5 August 1922
I was always drawn to the idea behind The Final Countdown (1980) where a modern warship is thrown back to World War II, but the execution of that idea was weak in the made-for-TV movie. Here is a story, predating the movie by 58 years, in which a destroyer Shoshone, as a result of a professor’s experiment combining the Callieri Cool Wave with ordinary radio, shows up amongst a fleet of Spanish galleons near Panama in the year 1564. The story is well-written, but the captain’s behavior seems unrealistic to me. —Michael Main
But the main point I desire to make is that this neutralization was to be effected by a combination of the ordinary wave impluse with the Callieri Cool Wave. The combination, you understand. It had never been tried on a large scale—it was a virgin experiment.
So the professor was given a free hand, and went below. It was past nine o’clock.
I remained on the bridge enjoying a cigar with the officer of the deck, and chatting over a coming boar hunt we were to have south of the canal during the coming weekend. we had been talking for perhaps ten minutes in the darkness of the bridge, with the black satin of the Caribbean spreading out ahead and about the ship, and the diamond stars projecting just above our heads as though ready for any plucking hand, when suddenly we found ourselves half blinded by a dazzling light in the west.
