The Undying Soldiers

The Undying Soldiers is a novella by the Soviet physicist, cyberneticist, and science fiction writer Anatoly Dneprov. Its original Russian title is Глиняный бог (literally "The Clay God" or "The God of Clay"), and it appeared around 1963; it has also been translated into Chinese as The Clay God. The story is set in an isolated German research institute deep in the Sahara Desert: a young chemistry laboratory assistant, Meldari, lured by the promise of high wages, arrives at a camp "worse than hell" to perform spectral analysis for Dr. Schwarz, and gradually realizes that he is serving an invisible military project. The institute's true master is Dr. Graber, who has studied organic silicon compounds for years and seeks to replace the carbon in the human body with silicon, transforming soldiers into "undying soldiers" who need neither food nor water, fear neither heat nor radiation, and are impervious to weapons. Those transformed lose the ability to speak and think, can be kept running only on alkaline water, and are reduced to walking corpses—living weapons. Meldari and several colleagues whose consciences are not yet dead eventually find the flaw: replace the alkaline water with plain water, and the siliconized soldiers solidify on the battlefield, turning into a "cemetery" of stone statues.