The Fredric Brown Megapack Read Free

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 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 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 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