The Fredric Brown Megapack Read Free Page A

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 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 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 peoples about to exterminate one and so weaken the other that it would retrogress and never fulfil its destiny, but decay and return to mindless dust whence it came. And I 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. “I am the end of evolution of a race so old the time cannot 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 cannot—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