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Excerpts from _The Hero Who Never Was_, by Adrian McCullough.
        (Harper-Janovitch, New York, 1987.) pgs 243-245.

EPILOGUE

So that was it. We'd walked from Omaha Beach all the way to Berlin. One
step at a time, we'd waded and shoved, pushed and shot, and forced an
uncooperative hunk of metal and an uncooperative bastard of a man into
becoming a hero.

A hero that, it quickly became obvious, wasn't needed any more. We
couldn't fool the world about Dreadnought without the fog of war to hide the
flaws. The living symbol of American industry wasn't suited to the Berlin
we'd found ourselves in, the Berlin of crumbled and bombed-out buildings,
the Berlin of an uneasy peace, the Berlin of ten-year-old prisoners of war
and the Berlin of the Reich's last, desperate, stand.

Dreadnought wasn't needed in Berlin..._police_ were needed now, not tanks.
He wasn't needed in Europe, and he wasn't needed in the Pacific, because
the _real_ metahumans who had been trapped by the situation in Europe,
like the Blue and the Grey, Spitfire, the Flying Tiger, were now there,
fighting alongside the Wave and Lightin' Hopkins. Who needed a walking
tank when the Blue and the Grey were there? Who needed Dreadnought
clanking his way into battle when Spitfire could protect the Wave as she
literally smashed Pacific atolls into pebbles?

Who, indeed?

The last I heard, before I was shipped home, to return to my studio and my
peacetime occupation of wedding photographs and freelance
photojournalism, was that the Brit and the Major had proposed that we
admit what we'd done to the world, that we simply announce that
Dreadnought wasn't quite the invincible fighting machine we'd always
painted him as being. The other officers were less than enthusiastic about
that suggestion, I'd heard,and the decision was made to simply ship the
Thing home and claim that Dreadnought had returned to civilian life, just
like all the other doughboys.

So they did. The Thing got stuck in a basement at Oak Ridge, and
Dreadnought himself got stuck in a basement in the Pentagon. The Major's
revenge at last, I guess, forcing the bastard himself to sit down in the
bowels of this spanking-new office building and shuffle papers all day.
Occasionally, during the following couple of years, I heard people
occasionally mention Dreadnought, most often in the 'I wonder what he's
doing now?' way. As time went on, people stopped wondering about him,
and I took the photograph that had made the cover of Life off my wall and
put it in my safe-deposit box.

Then Korea happened.

Robert Doyle, of all people, came knocking on my door the day the whole
mess started, telling me that they were thinking of starting the
Dreadnought project back up for this new Korean police action, and was I
interested in coming back on board?

When I heard that, it took a lot of self-control to stop myself from laughing
my head off. Then I took Robert out for a drink. "To talk about old times," I
said. And we did. We talked so much about old times that I managed to talk
_him_ right out of doing anything with Dreadnought again.

Even without Robert and myself, the Army and Navy still managed to put
together some sort of team. They even managed to pry Dreadnought himself
out of his cubbyhole in the Pentagon (as if he wouldn't have taken _any_
opportunity to escape,) hauled the Thing out from its basement, and set sail
for Pusan.

I'll refer you to any good history of the 'Korean conflict,' for details of
what
happened to us in the early days of the Korean War, but, in short, the
mighty American army got itself kicked all the way down to the very end of
the Korean peninsula, and for a couple of weeks it looked as if we might get
kicked out of Korea altogether, and there weren't enough boats for a
Dunkirk in Pusan.

That's where our story really ends, on the Pusan Perimeter. Oh, for a few
days here and a few days there, they'd managed to put Dreadnought to
some use, but not really all that well. The only thing that made the
Dreadnought scam work in Germany in the first place was the fact that we
were winning _anyway_...unlike Korea. Inch by inch, mile by mile, across
the hilly, mountainous, Korean countryside, the troops of the recently-
formed U.N. were pushed back, and back, and back, and back.

Eventually, the only toehold we had on the peninsula was a tiny region
around Pusan. We had a port, we had some countryside, and we had
nothing else. One more really good push, and we would have seen whether
or not Americans could breathe water.

The brass knew that. They put everything they had on the line, to hold out
until reinforcements and supplies came. Everything they had included
Dreadnought, who was assigned to a part of the line a few miles to the
northwest of Pusan proper. There wasn't much action on that part of the
line, which was good, because Dreadnought was pretty much the only heavy
weapon that those poor slobs there had.

And then it happened. The North Koreans made another push, on
Dreadnought's section of the line. The infantry around him had to fall back,
according to the Army. The North Koreans were opening up with
everything they had, machine guns, artillery, even rocks as far as I know,
and the poorly-staffed and even more poorly-supplied troops on that line
couldn't hold out. They pulled back, and then they pulled even further back,
and then they broke and ran, leaving their guns behind.

Leaving Dreadnought as the only Thing between the North Koreans and
Pusan itself.

Details of what he did are sketchy. The troops who found his body after we
started pushing the North Koreans back could only report that there were a
hell a lot of dead Koreans in front of him, and absolutely nobody behind
him. The suit had been breached in about eight places, and he'd been hit in
the legs, the chest, the right arm, and the head.

But he held the line. Whatever else you can say about the bastard, you can
say that. Not a single North Korean breached the northwest section of the
Pusan Perimeter that day.

He held the line.

Occasionally, when I drink enough to forget what an utter, utter bastard he
was, I can think back to that simple statement, and forgive him ... some ...
of his trespasses.

Perhaps ... just, perhaps, mind you, in that one, brief moment,
Dreadnought...even Dreadnought... could be a hero.


It's been twenty-odd years since I saw the wire report about Dreadnought's
death. Twenty years. Sometimes I think that his death was the end of America's
Heroic Age. Sure, there were people like Who and the Carpenter who came
after, but the bright, shining days of heroes seems gone, now.

The scientists, the archaeologists, and the geneticists tell me that
parahumans seem to appear in waves, and the last wave peaked around 1944.
There are the occasional indication that we're ramping up for another wave
of them, but I don't know...I have my doubts that we'll ever see the likes
of Coral, the Flying Tiger, the Golden Swashbuckler, and, yes, even
Dreadnought, again. It's not the power that makes the hero. It's the
person, the individual..or, in Dreadnought's case, about twenty of us.

I always found that ironic, and irony isn't the worst way to end a book,
they tell me. The world has turned, and the most heroic man I ever knew, or
I'm ever to know again, was a bastard, a thousand pounds of metal, and
twenty friends of mine.

Rest in peace, Dreadnought.

And you, too, you bastard.

---------------------------------

This ends this excerpt from _The Hero Who Never Was_, by Adrian
McCullough. This has been a BBC AudioBook production. _The Hero Who
Never Was_  was read by the author. Audio production by Ken Stacy. Editing by
Richard Alveraz. All rights reserved by Harper-Janovitch.