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 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 nationalisms, battles between champions to decide issues between races were not unknown.
“You and your opponent are here pitted against one another, naked and unarmed, under conditions equally unfamiliar to you both, equally unpleasant to you both. There is no time limit, for here there is no time. The survivor is the champion of his race. That race survives.”
“But—” Carson’s protest was too inarticulate for expression, but the voice answered it.
“It is fair. The conditions are such that the accident of physical strength will not completely decide the issue. There is a barrier. You will understand. Brain-power and courage will be more important than strength. Most especially courage, which is the will to survive.”
“But while this goes on, the fleets will—”
“No, you are in another space, another time. For as long as you are here, time stands still in the universe you know. I see you wonder whether this place is real. It is, and it is not. As I—to your limited understanding—am and am not real. My existence is mental and not physical. You saw me as a planet; it could have been as a dust-mote or a sun.
“But to you this place is now real. What you suffer here will be real. And if you die here, your death will be real. If you die, your failure will be the end of your race. That is enough for you to know.”
And then the voice was gone.
Again he was alone, but not alone. For as Carson looked up, he saw that the red thing, the sphere of horror that he now knew was the Outsider, was rolling towards him.
Rolling.
It seemed to have no legs or arms that he could see, no features. It rolled across the sand with the fluid quickness of a drop of mercury. And before it, in some manner he could not understand, came a wave of nauseating hatred.
Carson looked about him frantically. A stone, lying in the sand a few feet away, was the nearest thing to a weapon. It wasn’t large, but it had sharp edges, like a slab of flint. It looked a bit like blue flint.
He picked it up, and crouched to receive the attack. It was coming fast, faster than he could run.
No time to think out how he was going to fight it; how anyway could he plan to battle a creature whose strength, whose characteristics, whose method of fighting he did not know? Rolling so fast, it looked more than ever like a perfect sphere.
Ten yards away. Five. And then it stopped.
Rather, it was stopped. Abruptly the near side of it flattened as though it had run up against an invisible wall. It bounced, actually bounced back.
Then it rolled forward again, but more cautiously. It stopped again, at the same place. It tried again, a few yards to one side.