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Captured by alien invaders who believe nuclear weapons are an impossible myth, a desperate resistance fighter swallows Earth's last capsule of Uranium-235 and baits his torturers into triggering the ultimate human atomic bomb.
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William Oberfield does not appear to have published much beyond a handful of pulp stories in the early 1950s, and “The Enormous Word” may be the best reason to remember his name. It is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most committed pieces of science fiction comedy ever to reach a pulp magazine’s printing press — a story that builds an entire invasion narrative to a single punchline and then executes that punchline with absolute conviction.
The punchline is a burp.
Not a metaphorical burp. Not a burp standing in for something else. A literal belch — Uranium-powered, city-destroying, alien-fleet-routing — delivered by Winston Eberly in the middle of a torture chamber in the Sahara Desert as the last act of human defiance against an extraterrestrial occupation. The force of it knocks gulls from the sky over the Mediterranean and rattles windows in Italy.
This is the story. It fully commits.
The Occupation as Cold War Parable
Before we get to the burp — and we will get to the burp — it’s worth sitting with what Oberfield is actually building in the story’s first half, because it’s doing more than scene-setting for a punchline.
The alien invasion of “The Enormous Word” has the texture of occupation rather than conquest. The invaders don’t destroy; they subjugate. They’ve put the entire world to sleep at nightfall, disabled every motor and electrical device, stripped away all refined Uranium to prevent exactly the kind of resistance Eberly is carrying across the countryside. They’ve established a single city in the Sahara and rule from a distance, mostly invisible, occasionally sweeping down to collect anyone who steps out of line.
For an American reader in 1950, this architecture would have been immediately recognizable. The story was published the same year the Korean War began, five years after the end of World War II, at the height of early Cold War anxiety about occupation, collaboration, and resistance. The space men aren’t aliens in the War of the Worlds sense — they’re colonizers. They’ve set up an administrative city and imposed compliance through the credible threat of mass death. The “good little Earthmen” who go obediently to bed at dusk are collaborators, whether they mean to be or not.
What Eberly is doing — crawling across open country with Uranium in a box, carrying the components of a weapon that can destroy the occupier’s central node — is resistance in the classic World War II sense. The story takes this seriously. The year of back-breaking work, the network of hidden scientists, the desperate cross-country run: these are not played for laughs. Eberly’s mission has real stakes and the story wants you to feel them.
Which makes what happens to him funnier.
The Villain’s Monologue as Information Delivery
One of the story’s quietly excellent moves is how it handles the alien commander’s boastful explanation of exactly how thin the occupiers’ forces are.
The man from space, trying to intimidate his prisoner, tells Eberly that the entire Earth is held under control by five ships rotating through five time zones, with most of the invaders clustered in a single city that could be destroyed by one well-placed bomb. He is telling Eberly this to demonstrate power. He is, in fact, handing Eberly the exact tactical intelligence the resistance needs.
This is the villain’s monologue as a genre trope — the bad guy explaining his entire plan to the protagonist who is about to defeat him — but Oberfield makes the joke explicit rather than leaving it subtext. Eberly thinks: thanks for the information anyway. I might be able to use it some day. He is being sarcastic in the face of imminent torture, but he also means it literally, and the story knows both things at once.
The revelation that the aliens don’t believe in nuclear fission — that their home system apparently never produced conditions for it, so they dismissed the warnings of humanity’s atomic experiments as propaganda and walked directly into the world’s most radioactive city — is the comic engine that makes the ending possible. Their greatest weakness is their certainty that a thing they’ve never encountered cannot exist.
Eberly’s body is carrying proof that it does.
The Commitment of the Ending
What makes “The Enormous Word” work is not the punchline itself but Oberfield’s commitment to it.
The story does not wink at you. It does not put ironic quotation marks around what Winston Eberly does in that torture chamber. He is a genuine hero, carrying out a genuine act of sacrifice in service of a genuine resistance. The fact that his method of delivering a Uranium bomb to the alien city’s radiation generators happens to involve his digestive system does not diminish the heroism — it just makes the heroism profoundly, magnificently absurd.
It was a terrible, frightening, destructive, big burp.
That sentence is doing a lot of work. The adjectives are pulling in two directions simultaneously — terrible and frightening pointing toward the gravity of the situation, big pointing toward the comedy of the method — and somehow they hold together. The story earns that sentence because everything before it has been earnest enough to make the absurdity land.
The aliens, when they return to look at the crater, are described as circling with troubled eyes and speaking sad words before pointing their ships toward space. The story has, in its final lines, a moment of genuine melancholy for them. These are survivors of a race driven from their home world, clutching at conquest because it’s all they have left. The fact that they are defeated by the digestive system of one defiant Earthman does not make their situation less pathetic. It just makes the whole thing more ridiculous, which is exactly the note Oberfield is going for.
The Pulp Tradition of the Absurd Victory
The story belongs to a tradition that runs through pulp science fiction and into the broader campfire aesthetic the series explores — the tradition of the improbable win, the underdog who defeats the overwhelming force through some combination of ingenuity, desperation, and sheer dumb luck.
The Men Return ended with Finn killing an Organism with a rock that was simply a rock, rejoicing in the weight of a universe governed by cause and effect again. “Man of Distinction” ended with humanity being saved because Al Hanley’s liver was too specialized to be useful as slave labor. The aliens in “The Ambassador’s Pet” were defeated not by human ingenuity but by the assumptions human intelligence makes about which creatures are pets and which are diplomats.
In all of these stories, the victory is real but the method is undignified, and the dignity doesn’t matter. What matters is that the thing that was going to happen doesn’t happen, and the thing that wasn’t supposed to be possible turns out to be exactly possible enough.
Eberly’s burp is the most extreme version of this tradition. He doesn’t use a weapon. He doesn’t outwit the invaders in any strategic sense. He uses their own radiation generator to set off the only atomic device available, which happens to be inside him, and he provokes them into doing it by insulting their bravery.
It is ridiculous. It works. Gulls are knocked from the sky over the Mediterranean.
That’s pulp fiction at its most unabashedly itself, and Oberfield pulls it off.
