The racing flicker abruptly stopped, upon one frozen tableau. A bench on the dusty campus, against a low adobe wall. Elora Ronee, with a pile of books propped on her knees to support pen and paper. Her dark eyes were staring away across the campus, and her sun-brown face looked tense and troubled.
In the huge dim room aboard the wrecked warship, a gong throbbed softly. A red arrow flamed in the cube, pointing down at the note on the girl’s knee. Cryptic symbols flashed above it. And Brek realized that the humming of the achron-integrators had stopped.
“What’s this?” rasped the anxious Astrarch. “A schoolgirl writing a note - what has she to do with a space battle?”
Brek scanned the fiery symbols. “She was deciding the battle - that day twenty years ago!” His voice rang with elation. “You see, she had a date to go dancing in Toran with Tony Grimm that night. But her father was giving a special lecture on the new theories of achronic force. Tony broke the date, to attend the lecture.”
As Brek watched the motionless image in the cube, his voice turned a little husky. “Elora was angry - that was before she knew Tony very well. I had asked her for a date. And, at the moment you see, she has just written a note, to say that she would go dancing with me.”
Brek gulped. “But she is undecided, you see. Because she loves Tony. A very little would make her tear up the note to me, and write another to Tony, to say that she would go to the lecture with him.”
The Astrarch stared cadaverously. “But how could that decide the battle?”
“In the past that we have lived,” Brek told him, “Elora sent the note to me. I went dancing with her, and missed the lecture. Tony attended it - and got the germ idea that finally caused his autosight to be better than mine.
“But, if she had written to Tony instead, he would have offered, out of contrition, to cut the lecture - so the analyzers indicate. I should have attended the lecture in Tony’s place, and my autosight would have been superior in the end.”
The Astrarch’s waxen head nodded slowly. “But - can you really change the past?”
Brek paused for a moment, solemnly. “We have all the power of the ship’s converters,” he said at last. “We have the high-frequency achronic field, as a lever through which to apply it. Surely, with the millions of kilowatts to spend, we can stimulate a few cells in a schoolgirl’s brain. We shall see.”
His long, pale fingers moved swiftly over the control keys. At last, deliberately, he touched a green button. The converters whispered again through the silent ship. The achron-integrators whirred again. Beyond, giant transformers began to whine.
And that still tableau came to sudden life.
Elora Ronee tore up the note that began, “Dear Bill - ” Brek and the Astrarch leaned forward, as her trembling fingers swiftly wrote: “Dear Tony - I’m so sorry that I was angry. May I come with you to father’s lecture? Tonight - “
The image faded. “Minus four - “
The metallic rasp of the speaker brought Brek Veronar to himself with a start. Could he have been dozing - with contact just four minutes away? He shook himself. He had a queer, unpleasant feeling - as if he had forgotten a nightmare dream in which the battle was fought and lost.
He rubbed his eyes, scanned the control board. The autosight was set, the pick-ups were tuned, the director relays tested. His part was done. He tried to relax the puzzling tension in him.
“Minus three - “
Sodium bombs filled the void ahead with vast silver plumes and streamers. Staring into the black cube of the screen, Brek found once more the six tiny black motes of Tony Grimm’s ships. He couldn’t help an uneasy shake of his head.
Was Tony mad? Why didn’t he veer aside, delay the contact? Scattered in space, his ships could harry the Astrarchy’s commerce, and interrupt bombardment of the Earth. But, in a head-on battle, they were doomed.
Brek listened to the quiet hum of the achron-integrators. Under these conditions, the new autosight gave an accuracy of fire of forty percent. Even if Tony’s gunnery was perfect, the odds were still two to one against him.
“Minus two - “
Two minutes! Brek looked down at the jeweled chronometer on his wrist. For a moment he had an odd feeling that the design was unfamiliar. Strange, when he had worn it for twenty years.
The dial blurred a little. He remembered the day that Tony and Elora gave it to him - the day he left the university to come to Astrophon. It was too nice a gift. Neither of them had much money.
He wondered if Tony had ever guessed his love for Elora. Probably it was better that she had always declined his attentions. No shadow of jealousy had ever come over their friendship.
“Minus one - “
This wouldn’t do! Half angrily, Brek jerked his eyes back to the screen. Still, however, in the silvery sodium clouds, he saw the faces of Tony and Elora. Still he couldn’t forget the oddly unfamiliar pressure of the chronometer on his wrist - it was like the soft touch of Elora’s fingers, when she had fastened it there.
Suddenly the black flecks in the screen were not targets any more. Brek caught a long gasping breath. After all, he was an Earthman. After twenty years in the Astrarch’s generous pay, this timepiece was still his most precious possession.
His gray eyes narrowed grimly. Without the autosight, the Astrarch’s fleet would be utterly blind in the sodium clouds. Given any sort of achronic range finder, Tony Grimm could wipe it out.
Brek’s gaunt body trembled. Death, he knew, would be the sure penalty. In the battle or afterward - it didn’t matter. He knew that he would accept it without regret.
“Zero!”
The achron-integrators were whirring busily, and the warrior Queen quivered to the first salvo of her guns. Then Brek’s clenched fists came down on the carefully set keyboard. The autosight stopped humming. The guns ceased to fire.
Brek picked up the Astrarch’s telephone. “I’ve stopped the autosight.” His voice was quiet and low. “It is quite impossible to set it again in two minutes.”
The telephone clicked and was dead.
The vessel shuddered and the lights went out. Sirens wailed. Air valves clanged. The lights came on, went off again. Presently, there were no more hits. Smothered in darkness, the great room remained very silent.
The tiny racing tick of the chronometer was the only sound.
After an eternal time, feeble emergency lights came on. The Astrarch came stumbling into the room, looking dazed and pale.
A group of spacemen followed him. Their stricken, angry faces made an odd contrast with their gay uniforms. Before their vengeful hatred, Brek felt cold and ill. But the Astrarch stopped their ominous advance.
“The Earthman has doomed himself as well,” the shaken ruler told them. “There’s not much more that you can do. And certainly no haste about it.”
He left them muttering at the door and came slowly to Brek.
“Crushed,” he whispered. “You destroyed me, Veronar.” A trembling hand wiped at the pale waxen mask of his face. “Everything is lost. The Queen disabled. None of our ships able to undertake rescue. We’ll be baked alive.”
His hollow eyes stared dully at Brek. “In those two minutes, you destroyed the Astrarchy.” His voice seemed merely tired, strangely without bitterness. “Just two minutes,” he murmured wearily. “If time could be recaptured - “
“Yes,” Brek said, “I stopped the autosight.” He lifted his gaunt shoulders defiantly, and met the menacing stares of the spacemen. “And they can do nothing about it?”
“Can you?” Hope flickered in the Astrarch’s eyes.
“Once you told me, Veronar, that the past could be changed. Then I wouldn’t listen. But now - try anything you can. You might be able to save yourself from the unpleasantness that my men are planning.”