“My spine congealed. The thing that had crossed the valley was a monstrous bird of prey. It was wearing a spacesuit, but no helmet, and I could see its vulture-like head bobbing about in the glow.
“It seemed to be in pain. It had halted at the edge of the glow, as if fearful of what lay beyond it, and suddenly as I stared it began furiously to pluck and tear at its breast with its taloned foreclaws.
“So frenzied were the creature’s exertions that the front of its spacesuit came away in shreds. The hideous creature had scales on its breast instead of feathers, and a pulsing, lizardlike throat … a throat which turned red as it continued to inflict cruel injuries on itself.
“The impression I got was one of agonized despair, of a creature trapped and cornered that could only escape by destroying itself. Again and again it slashed at its flesh, twisting about in the glow, its eyes brimming with agony.
“Then, suddenly, it was no longer alone. A little bird-lizard shape had materialized at its side and was going through the same grisly pantomime.
“As I blinked in stunned disbelief a third shape swam into view—and a fourth. The eyes of the third shape were dull and opaque, like frosted glass, and the fourth shape was so atrophied that the scales on its breast seemed to overlap, squeezing out the flesh between them.
“Then, abruptly, the first shape began to grow transparent. It shriveled and glistened, and I could see its skeleton gleaming beneath the glassy transparency of its dissolving flesh.
“It vanished in a gush of gray light, so quickly that the air about it had a sucked-in look. Swiftly, terribly, the other shapes converged toward that swirling vacuum and were swallowed up, as though with their passing Time had collapsed in upon itself.
“That Time had collapsed I knew! For I am no fool. Long ago the alien inhabitant of another world had landed in that valley of all horror, and the living shuttlecock had split it up into time fragments, the better to destroy it.
“It wanted me to know that—to realize that my time was short. So it had brought back a scene out of the past to unnerve me, and sap my will!
“Could I go on taking it? I hadn’t much time to think about it—for the web was filling with another picture. A living shuttlecock, the old one had called it. So now it was weaving another picture for me on Time’s dissolving loom.
“It was a picture so hideous I could hardly bring myself to believe in it. It was a picture of still another me. But if the old one had seemed palsied, wretched, at the end of his endurance—the face that stared out at me from the radiance was a thousandfold more so!
“It was a face that had lost itself in Time—a face that was all sagging jowls and puckered brows, a toothless, yellowed caricature of a face.
“But it was my face still—my face ravaged by a century’s decay!
“Looking at myself as I would be—I suddenly had no longer any desire to live. A small, shrill voice shrieked within me that the monstrous, living shuttlecock desired just that—that it was resorting to a devilish subterfuge!
“But I did not heed the voice. I just stood there, waiting to die, hoping that the end would come quickly.
“The blast was deafening! The sudden crash of it made a muffled booming in the thin air, and smashed against my eardrums like a trump of doom. The flare was blinding. The awful brightness of it lit up the cave like a hundred suns, and burned through my eyeballs into my brain.
“When the smoke cleared all I could see at first was a shattered something lying on the floor of the cave, all twisted and bent back on itself like a smoking heap of shattered glass.
“As I shook my big, dull head to clear it my boy-self lifted off his helmet and returned his blaster to the holster on his hip. His face was shining with triumph. The sweat was running off it and he was breathing heavily.
“But he spoke to me and his words were good to hear.
“ ‘We got him, pal!’
“He didn’t say ‘it’—didn’t refer to the monstrous creature as something unspeakably alien.
“No—why should he? To him it wasn’t a horror in the valley of the moon. It was something out of a nightmare and he knew he’d wake up safe in his own little bed at home.
“He was still thinking of me as his father—in a nightmare. We’d been hunting jabberwocks together!
“And that lad was still in me—a part of me! I tell you, it sobered me and made me feel ashamed.
“I was still feeling ashamed when both the boy and the old one vanished. Perhaps melted back would be a better way of putting it. For they did seem to dissolve and flow back, rush back, into me an instant before I found myself standing alone again—in that valley that would never grow old!”
Charley had arisen and was standing by the fire. Suddenly he stooped and threw another log into the flames.
Far to the west the lights of the biggest spaceport on Earth blinked through the purple haze, and every time a ship took off, bound for the great outer planets, the desert would light up for miles.
But that light couldn’t hold a candle to the one that blazed in Charley’s eyes.
The sky was harsh with the flare of rocket jets when Captain Ralph Langford emerged from his deep space cruiser on the Mars City landing field. There was a girl standing alone at the far end of the field, and for a moment Langford thought it might be Joan, irrational as the thought was. Of course, Joan couldn’t be here; he was to see her at the hospital. He started across the field, blinking in the glare, his eyes shining with a
