campfire that still held a man within the circle of its light.
Still, Webster knew, he must leave that fire. As the men had done with the cities two centuries before, he must walk off and leave it. And he must not look back.
He had to go to Mars—or at least start for Mars. There was no question there, at all. He had to go.
Whether he would survive the trip, whether he could perform the operation once he had arrived, he did not know. He wondered vaguely, whether agoraphobia could be fatal. In its most exaggerated form, he supposed it could.
He reached out a hand to ring, then hesitated. No use having Jenkins pack. He would do it himself— something to keep him busy until the ship arrived.
From the top shelf of the wardrobe in the bedroom, he took down a bag and saw that it was dusty. He blew on it, but the dust still clung. It had been there for too many years.
As he packed, the room argued with him, talked in that mute tongue with which inanimate but familiar things may converse with a man.
'You can't go,' said the room. 'You can't go off and leave me.'
And Webster argued back, half pleading, half explanatory. 'I have to go. Can't you understand? It's a friend, an old friend. I will be coming back.'
Packing done, Webster returned to the study, slumped into his chair.
He must go and yet he couldn't go. But when the ship arrived, when the time had come, he knew that he would walk out of the house and toward the waiting ship.
He steeled his mind to that, tried to set it in a rigid pattern, tried to blank out everything but the thought that he was leaving.
Things in the room intruded on his brain, as if they were part of a conspiracy to keep him there. Things that he saw as if he were seeing them for the first time. Old, remembered things that suddenly were new. The chronometer that showed both Earthian and Martian time, the days of the month, the phases of the moon. The picture of his dead wife on the desk. The trophy he had won at prep school. The framed short snorter bill that had cost him ten bucks on his trip to Mars.
He stared at them, half unwilling at first, then eagerly, storing up the memory of them in his brain. Seeing them as separate components of a room he had accepted all these years as a finished whole, never realizing what a multitude of things went to make it up.
Dusk was falling, the dusk of early spring, a dusk that smelled of early pussy willows.
The ship should have arrived long ago. He caught himself listening for it, even as he realized that he would not hear it. A ship, driven by atomic motors, was silent except when it gathered speed. Landing and taking off, it floated like thistledown, with not a murmur in it.
It would be here soon. It would have to be here soon or he could never go. Much longer to wait, he knew, and his high-keyed resolution would crumble like a mound of dust in beating rain. Not much longer could he hold his purpose against the pleading of the room, against the flicker of the fire, against the murmur of the land where five generations of Websters had lived their lives and died.
He shut his eyes and fought down the chill that crept across his body. He couldn't let it get him now, he told himself. He had to stick it out. When the ship arrived he still must be able to get up and walk out the door to the waiting port.
A tap came on the door.
'Come in,' Webster called.
It was Jenkins, the light from the fireplace flickering on his shining metal hide.
'Had you called earlier, sir?' he asked.
Webster shook his head.
'I was afraid you might have,' Jenkins explained, 'and wondered why I didn't come. There was a most extraordinary occurrence, sir. Two men came with a ship and said they wanted you to go to Mars.'
'They are here,' said Webster. 'Why didn't you call me?'
He struggled to his feet.
'I didn't think, sir,' said Jenkins, 'that you would want to be bothered. It was so preposterous. I finally made them understand you could not possibly want to go to Mars.'
Webster stiffened, felt chill fear gripping at his heart. Hands groping for the edge of the desk, he sat down in the chair, sensed the walls of the room closing in about him, a trap that would never let him go.
Carson opened his eyes, and found himself looking upward into a flickering blue dimness.
It was hot, and he was lying on sand, and a sharp rock embedded in the sand was hurting his back. He rolled over to his side, off the rock, and them pushed himself up to a sitting position.
'I'm crazy,' he thought. 'Crazy—or dead—or something.' The sand was blue, bright blue. And there wasn't any such thing as bright blue sand on Earth or any of the planets.
Blue sand.
Blue sand under a blue dome that wasn't the sky nor yet a room, but a circumscribed area—somehow he knew it was circumscribed and finite even though he couldn't see to the top of it.
He picked up some of the sand in his hand and let it run through his fingers. It trickled down onto his bare leg. Bare?
Naked. He was stark naked, and already his body was dripping perspiration from the enervating heat, coated blue with sand wherever sand had touched it.
But elsewhere his body was white.
He thought: Then this sand is really blue. If it seemed blue only because of the blue light, then I'd be blue also. But I'm white, so the sand is blue. Blue sand. There isn't any blue sand. There isn't any place like this place I'm in.
Sweat was running down in his eyes.
It was hot, hotter than hell. Only hell—the hell of the ancients—was supposed to be red and not blue.
But if this place wasn't hell, what was it? Only Mercury, among the planets, had heat like this and this wasn't Mercury. And Mercury was some four billion miles from—
It came back to him then, where he'd been. In the little one-man scouter, outside the orbit of Pluto, scouting a scant million miles to one side of the Earth Armada drawn up in battle array there to intercept the Outsiders.
That sudden strident nerve-shattering ringing of the alarm bell when the rival scouter—the Outsider ship— had come within range of his detectors—
No one knew who the Outsiders were, what they looked like, from what far galaxy they came, other than that it was in the general direction of the Pleiades.
First, sporadic raids on Earth colonies and outposts. Isolated battles between Earth patrols and small groups of Outsider spaceships; battles sometimes won and sometimes lost, but never to date resulting in the capture of an alien vessel. Nor had any member of a raided colony ever survived to describe the Outsiders who had left the ships, if indeed they had left them.
Not a too-serious menace, at first, for the raids had not been too numerous or destructive. And individually, the ships had proved slightly inferior in armament to the best of Earth's fighters, although somewhat superior in speed and maneuverability.
A sufficient edge in speed, in fact, to give the Outsiders their choice of running or fighting, unless surrounded.
Nevertheless, Earth had prepared for serious trouble, for a showdown, building the mightiest armada of all time. It had been waiting now, that armada, for a long time. But now the showdown was coming.
Scouts twenty billion miles out had detected the approach of a mighty fleet—a showdown fleet—of the Outsiders. Those scouts had never come back, but their radiotronic messages had. And now Earth's armada, all ten thousand ships and half-million fighting spacemen, was out there, outside Pluto's orbit, waiting to intercept and battle to the death.
And an even battle it was going to be, judging by the advance reports of the men of the far picket line who
