had given their lives to report— before they had died—on the size and strength of the alien fleet.
Anybody's battle, with the mastery of the solar system hanging in the balance, on an even chance. A last and only chance, for Earth and all her colonies lay at the utter mercy of the Outsiders if they ran that gauntlet—
Oh yes. Bob Carson remembered now.
Not that it explained blue sand and flickering blueness. But that strident alarming of the bell and his leap for the control panel. His frenzied fumbling as he strapped himself into the seat. The dot in the visiplate that grew larger.
The dryness of his mouth. The awful knowledge that this was it. For him, at least, although the main fleets were still out of range of one another.
This, his first taste of battle. Within three seconds or less he'd be victorious, or a charred cinder. Dead.
Three seconds—that's how long a space-battle lasted. Time enough to count to three, slowly, and then you'd won or you were dead. One hit completely took care of a lightly armed and armored little one-man craft like a scouter.
Frantically—as, unconsciously, his dry lips shaped the word ' 'One''— he worked at the controls to keep that growing dot centered on the crossed spiderwebs of the visiplate. His hands doing that, while his right foot hovered over the pedal that would fire the bolt. The single bolt of concentrated hell that had to hit—or else. There wouldn't be time for any second shot.
'Two.' He didn't know he'd said that, either. The dot in the visiplate wasn't a dot now. Only a few thousand miles away, it showed up in the magnification of the plate as though it were only a few hundred yards off. It was a sleek, fast little scouter, about the size of his.
And an alien ship, all right.
'Thr—' His foot touched the bolt-release pedal—
And then the Outsider had swerved suddenly and was off the crosshairs. Carson punched keys frantically, to follow.
For a tenth of a second, it was out of the visiplate entirely, and then as the nose of his scouter swung after it, he saw it again, diving straight toward the ground.
The ground?
It was an optical illusion of some sort. It had to be, that planet—or whatever it was—that now covered the visiplate. Whatever it was, it couldn't be there. Couldn't possibly. There wasn't any planet nearer than Neptune three billion miles away—with Pluto around on the opposite side of the distant pinpoint sun.
His detectors! They hadn't shown any object of planetary dimensions, even of asteroid dimensions. They still didn't.
So it couldn't be there, that whatever-it-was he was diving into, only a few hundred miles below him.
And in his sudden anxiety to keep from crashing, he forgot even the Outsider ship.
He fired the front braking rockets, and even as the sudden change of speed slammed him forward against the seat straps, he fired full right for an emergency turn. Pushed them down and held them down, knowing that he needed everything the ship had to keep from crashing and that a turn that sudden would black him out for a moment.
It did black him out.
And that was all. Now he was sitting in hot blue sand, stark naked but otherwise unhurt. No sign of his spaceship and—for that matter— no sign of space. That curve overhead wasn't a sky, whatever else it was.
He scrambled to his feet.
Gravity seemed a little more than Earth-normal. Not much more.
Flat sand stretching away, a few scrawny bushes in clumps here and there. The bushes were blue, too, but in varying shades, some lighter than the blue of the sand, some darker.
Out from under the nearest bush ran a little thing that was like a lizard, except that it had more than four legs. It was blue, too. Bright blue. It saw him and ran back again under the bush.
He looked up again, trying to decide what was overhead. It wasn't exactly a roof, but it was dome-shaped. It flickered and was hard to look at. But definitely, it curved down to the ground, to the blue sand, all around him.
He wasn't far from being under the center of the dome. At a guess, it was a hundred yards to the nearest wall, if it was a wall. It was as though a blue hemisphere of something, about two hundred and fifty yards in circumference, was inverted over the flat expanse of the sand.
And everything blue, except one object. Over near a far curving wall there was a red object. Roughly spherical, it seemed to be about a yard in diameter. Too far for him to see clearly through the flickering blueness. But, unaccountably, he shuddered.
He wiped sweat from his forehead, or tried to, with the back of his hand.
Was this a dream, a nightmare? This heat, this sand, that vague feeling of horror he felt when he looked toward the red thing?
A dream? No, one didn't go to sleep and dream in the midst of a battle in space.
Death? No, never. If there were immortality, it wouldn't be a senseless thing like this, a thing of blue heat and blue sand and a red horror.
Then he heard the voice—
Inside his head he heard it, not with his ears. It came from nowhere or everywhere.
'Through spaces and dimensions wandering,' rang the words in his mind, 'and in this space and this time I find two people about to wage a war that would exterminate one and so weaken the other that it would retrogress and never fulfill its destiny, but decay and return to mindless dust whence it came. And 1 say this must not happen.''
'Who ... what are you?' Carson didn't say it aloud, but the question formed itself in his brain.
'You would not understand completely. I am—' There was a pause as though the voice sought—in Carson's brain—for a word that wasn't there, a word he didn't know.
'/ am the end of evolution of a race so old the time can not be expressed in words that have meaning to your mind. A race fused into a single entity, eternal—
'An entity such as your primitive race might become'—again the groping for a word—'time from now. So might the race you call, in your mind, the Outsiders. So I intervene in the battle to come, the battle between fleets so evenly matched that destruction of both races will result. One must survive. One must progress and evolve.''
'One?' thought Carson. 'Mine, or—?'
'It is in my power to stop the war, to send the Outsiders back to their galaxy. But they would return, or your race would sooner or later follow them there. Only by remaining in this space and time to intervene constantly could I prevent them from destroying one another, and I cannot remain.
'So I shall intervene now. I shall destroy one fleet completely without loss to the other. One civilization shall thus survive.'
Nightmare. This had to be nightmare, Carson thought. But he knew it wasn't.
It was too mad, too impossible, to be anything but real.
He didn't dare ask the question—which? But his thoughts asked it for him.
'The stronger shall survive,' said the voice. 'That I can not—and would not—
change. I merely intervene to make it a complete victory, not'—groping again—'not Pyrrhic victory to a broken race.
'From the outskirts of the not-yet battle I plucked two individuals, you and an Outsider. I see from your mind that in your early history of nationalisms battles between champions, to decide issues between races, were not unknown.
'You and your opponent are here pitted against one another, naked and unarmed, under conditions equally unfamiliar to you both, equally unpleasant to you both.
There is no time limit, for here there is no time. The survivor is the champion of his race. That race survives.'
'But—' Carson's protest was too inarticulate for expression, but the voice answered it.
'It is fair. The conditions are such that the accident of physical strength will not completely decide the issue. There is a barrier. You will understand. Brain-power and courage will be more important than strength. Most
