The Collection Read Free

and
then 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 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 on to his bare leg. Bare?
    He was stark naked, and already his body was dripping
perspiration from the enervating heat, coated blue with sand wherever sand had
touched it. 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 ... 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 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,
or from what far galaxy they came, other than that it was in the general
direction of the Pleiades.
    First, there had been 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 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 too serious a menace, at first, for the raids had not
been 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,
building the mightiest armada of all time. It had been waiting now, that
armada, for a long time. Now the showdown was coming.
    Scouts twenty billion miles out had detected the approach of
a mighty 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 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. He remembered that strident
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. One hit