“Minus four - “
The autosight was set, the pick-ups tuned, the director relays tested, a thousand details checked. Behind the control table, Brek Veronar tried to relax. His part was done.
A space battle was a conflict of machines. Human beings were too puny, too slow, even to comprehend the play of the titanic forces they had set loose. Brek tried to remember that he was the autosight’s inventor; he fought an oppression of helpless dread.
“Minus three - “
Sodium bombs filled the void ahead with vast silver plumes and streamers - for the autosight removed the need of telescopic eyes, and enabled ships to fight from deep smoke screens.
“Minus two - “
The two fleets came together at a relative velocity of twelve hundred thousand miles an hour. Maximum useful range of twenty-inch guns, even with the autosight, was only twenty thousand miles in free space.
Which meant, Brek realized, that the battle could last just two minutes.
In that brief time lay the destinies of Astrarchy and Earth - and Tony Grimm’s and Elora’s and his own.
“Minus one - “
The sodium screens made little puffs and trails of silver in the great black cube. The six Earth ships were visible behind them, through the magic of the achronic field pick-ups, now spaced in a close ring, ready for action.
Brek Veronar looked down at the jeweled chronometer on his wrist-a gift from the Astrarch. Listening to the rising hum of the achron-integrators, he caught his breath, tensed instinctively.
“Zero!”
The Warrior Queen began quivering to her great guns, a salvo of four firing every half-second. Brek breathed again, watching the chronometer. That was all he had to do. And in two minutes-
The vessel shuddered, and the lights went out. Sirens wailed, and air valves clanged. The lights came on, went off again. And abruptly the cube of the stereo screen was dark. The achron-integrators clattered and stopped.
The guns ceased to thud.
‘Power!” Brek gasped into a telephone. “Give me power! Emergency! The autosight has stopped and - “
But the telephone was dead.
There were no more hits. Smothered in darkness, the great room remained very silent. After an eternal time, feeble emergency lights came on. Brek looked again at his chronometer, and knew that the battle was ended.
But who the victor?
He tried to hope that the battle had been won before some last chance broadside crippled the flagship - until the Astrarch came stumbling into the room, looking dazed and pale.
“Crushed,” he muttered. “You failed me, Veronar.”
“What are the losses?” whispered Brek.
“Everything.” The shaken ruler dropped wearily at the control table. “Your achronic beams are dead. Five ships remain able to report defeat by radio. Two of them hope to make repairs.
“The Queen is disabled. Reaction batteries shot away, and main power plant dead. Repair is hopeless. And our present orbit will carry us far too close to the Sun. None of our ships able to undertake rescue. We’ll be baked alive.”
His perfumed dark head sank hopelessly. “In those two minutes, the Astrarchy was destroyed.” His hollow, smoldering eyes lifted resentfully to Brek. “Just two minutes!” He crushed a soft white fist against the table. “If time could be recaptured - “
“How were we beaten?” demanded Brek. “I can’t understand!”
“Marksmanship,” said the tired Astrarch. “Tony Grimm has something better than your autosight. He shot us to pieces before we could find the range.” His face was a pale mask of bitterness. “If my agents had employed him, twenty years ago, instead of you - ” He bit blood from his lip. “But the past cannot be changed.”
Brek was staring at the huge, silent bulk of the autosight. “Perhaps” - he whispered - “it can be!”
Trembling, the Astrarch rose to clutch his arm. “You spoke of that before,” gasped the agitated ruler. “Then I wouldn’t listen. But now-try anything you can, Veronar. To save us from roasting alive, at perihelion. Do you really think - “
The Astrarch shook his pale head. “I’m the madman,” he whispered. “To speak of changing even two minutes of the past!” His hollow eyes clung to Brek. “Though you have done amazing things, Veronar.”
The Earthman continued to stare at his huge creation. “The autosight itself brought me one clue, before the battle,” he breathed slowly. “The detector fields caught a beam of Tony Grimm’s, and analyzed the frequencies. He’s using achronic radiation a whole octave higher than anything I’ve tried. That must be the way to the sensitivity and penetration I have hoped for.”
Hope flickered in the Astrarch’s eyes. “You believe you can save us? How?”
“If the high-frequency beam can search out the determiner factors,” Brek told him, “it might be possible to alter them, with a sufficiently powerful field. Remember that we deal with probabilities, not with absolutes. And that small factors can determine vast results.
“The pick-ups will have to be rebuilt. And we’ll have to have power. Power to project the tracer fields. And a river of power - if we can trace out a decisive factor and attempt to change it. But the power plants are dead.
“Rebuild your pick-ups,” the Astrarch told him. “And you’ll have power - if I have to march every man aboard into the conversion furnaces, for fuel.”
Calm again, and confident, the short man surveyed the tall, gaunt Earthman with wondering eyes.
“You’re a strange individual, Veronar,” he said. “Fighting time and destiny to crush the planet of your birth! It isn’t strange that men call you the Renegade.”
Silent for a moment, Brek shook his haggard head. “I don’t want to be baked alive,” he said at last. “Give me power - and we’ll fight that battle again.”
The wreck dropped Sunward. A score of expert technicians toiled, under Brek’s expert direction, to reconstruct the achronic pick-ups. And a hundred men labored, beneath the ruthless eye of the Astrarch himself, to repair the damaged atomic converters.
They had crossed the orbit of Venus, when the autosight came back to humming life. The Astrarch was standing beside Brek, at the curved control table. The shadow of doubt had returned to his reddened, sleepless eyes. “Now,” he demanded, “what can you do about the battle?”
“Nothing, directly,” Brek admitted. “First we must search the past. We must find the factor that caused Tony Grimm to invent a better autosight than mine. With the high-frequency field - and the full power of the ship’s converters, if need be - we must reverse that factor. Then the battle should have a different outcome.”
The achron-integrators whirred, as Brek manipulated the controls, and the huge black cube began to flicker with the passage of ghostly images. Symbols of colored fire flashed and vanished within it.
“Well” anxiously rasped the Astrarch.
“It works!” Brek assured him. “The tracer fields are following all the world lines that intersected at the battle, back across the months and years. The analyzers will isolate the smallest - and hence most easily altered - essential factor.”
The Astrarch gripped his shoulder. “There - in the cube - yourself!”
The ghostly shape of the Earthman flickered out, and came again. A hundred times, Brek Veronar glimpsed himself in the cube. Usually the scene was the great arsenal laboratory, at Astrophon. Always he was differently garbed, always younger.
Then the background shifted. Brek caught his breath as he recognized glimpses of barren, stony, ocher-colored hills, and low, yellow adobe buildings. He gasped to see a freckled, red-haired youth and a slim, tanned, dark-eyed girl.
“That’s on Mars!” he whispered. “At Toran. He’s Tony Grimm. And she’s Elora Ronee - the Martian girl we loved.”