The Collection Read Free Page A

completely took care of a
lightly armed and armoured one-man craft like a scouter.
    Frantically — as his lips shaped the word ‘One’ — he worked
at the controls to keep that growing dot centred 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 fast little scouter, about the size of his.
    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 towards 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 couldn’t
be there. Couldn’t possibly! There wasn’t any planet nearer than Neptune
three billion miles away — with Pluto on the opposite side of the distant
pinpoint sun.
    His detectors! They hadn’t shown any object of
planetary dimensions, even of asteroid dimensions, and still didn’t.
    It couldn’t be there, that whatever-it-was he was diving
into, only a few hundred miles below him.
    In his sudden anxiety to keep from crashing, he forgot the
Outsider ship. He fired the front breaking rockets, and even as the sudden
change of speed slammed him forward against the seat straps, 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 centre 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 towards that 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