Isso soa como o Descanso do Viajante de David Masson (que tem foi objeto de várias outras perguntas story-identification aqui: primeiro Breve história; guerra onde mudanças de velocidade de tempo com a distância da linha de frente e depois Uma guerra em um planeta onde o tempo passa lentamente nos pólos e Que história se passa no planeta onde o tempo corre mais rápido à medida que se aproxima do pólo? ).
A matéria em si está disponível na íntegra aqui . Os últimos parágrafos são os seguintes (ênfase minha):
“XN 2. Things are livelier than ever. They certainly are hot stuff. Every new offensive from here is pitched back at us in the same style within minutes, I notice. That new cannon had only just started up when back came the same shells—I never knew They had them. Tit for tat.”
Into H’s brain, seemingly clarified by hunger and exhaustion and much emotion, flashed an unspeakable suspicion, one that he could never prove or disprove, having too little knowledge and experience, too little overall view. No one had ever seen the Enemy. No one knew how or when the War had begun. Information and communication were paralysingly difficult up here. No one knew what really happened to Time as one came close to the Frontier, or beyond it. Could it be that the conceleration there became infinite and that there was nothing beyond the Frontier? Could all the supposed missiles of the Enemy be their own, somehow returning? Perhaps the war had started with a peasant explorer lightheartedly flinging a stone northwards, which returned and struck him? Perhaps there was, then, no Enemy?
“XN 3. Couldn’t that gun’s own shells be reflected back from the Frontier, then?”
“XN 2. Impossible. Now you are to try to reach that forward missile post by the surface—our tunnel is destroyed—at 15º 40’ East—you can just see the hump near the edge of the I/R viewer’s limit—with this message; and tell him verbally to treble output.”
The ragged hole was too small. H left by the forward port. He ran, on his “walker,” into a ribbon of landscape which became a thicket of fire, a porcupine of fire, a Nessus-shirt to the Earth, as in a dream. Into an unbelievable supercrescendo of sound, light, heat, pressure, and impacts he ran, on and on up the now almost invisible slope . . .