Big Book of Science Fiction (17 page)

Fats grinned. “Be a damned fool.
Help you start your propaganda again and; go around kissing Marshies and
monkeys. Wonder what our little monkey’s thinking?” Lhin wasn’t thinking, then;
he’d solved the riddle of the factors in Fats’ mind, and he knew what the
decision would be. Now he was making copper sulphate, and seeing dawn come up
where night had been too long. There’s something beautiful about any dawn, and
this was very lovely to him.

<>

~ * ~

ARENA

by Fredric Brown

CARSON
opened his eyes, and found himself looking upward into a flickering blue
dimness.

It was hot, and he was lying on
sand, and a sharp rock embedded in the sand was hurting his back. He rolled
over to his side, off the rock, and then pushed himself up to a sitting
position.

“I’m crazy,” he thought. “Crazy—or
dead—or something.” The sand was blue, bright blue. And there wasn’t any such
thing as bright blue sand on Earth or any of the planets.

Blue sand.

Blue sand under a blue dome that
wasn’t the sky nor yet-a room, but a circumscribed area—somehow he knew it was
circumscribed and finite even though he couldn’t see to the top of it.

He picked up some of the sand in
his hand and let it run through his fingers. It trickled down onto his bare
leg.
Bare?

Naked. He was stark naked, and
already his body was dripping perspiration from the enervating heat, coated
blue with sand wherever sand had touched it.

But elsewhere his body was white.

He thought: Then this sand is
really blue. If it seemed blue only because of the blue light, then I’d be blue
also. But I’m white, so the sand
is
blue.
Blue sand.
There isn’t
any blue sand. There isn’t any place like this place I’m in.

Sweat was running down in his
eyes.

It was hot, hotter than Hades.
Only Hades—the Hades of the ancients—was supposed to be red and not blue.

But if this place wasn’t Hades,
what was it? Only Mercury, among the planets, had heat like this and this wasn’t
Mercury. And Mercury was some four billion miles from—

It came back to him then, where
he’d been. In the little one-man scouter, outside the orbit of Pluto, scouting
a scant million miles to one side of the Earth Armada drawn up in battle array
there to intercept the Outsiders.

That sudden strident
nerve-shattering ringing of the alarm bell when the rival scouter—the Outsider
ship—had come within range of his detectors—

~ * ~

No
one knew who the Outsiders were, what they looked like, from what far galaxy
they came, other than that it was in the general direction of the Pleiades.

First, sporadic raids on Earth
colonies and outposts. Isolated battles between Earth patrols and small groups
of Outsider spaceships; battles sometimes won and sometimes lost, but never to
date resulting in the capture of an alien vessel. Nor had any member of a
raided colony ever survived to describe the Outsiders who had left the ships,
if indeed they had left them.

Not a too-serious menace, at
first, for the raids had not been too 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, for a showdown, building the mightiest armada of all time.
It had been waiting now, that armada, for a long time. But now the showdown was
coming.

Scouts twenty billion miles out
had detected the approach of a mighty fleet—a showdown 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.

Not that it explained blue sand
and flickering blueness. But that strident alarming of the 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. Dead.

Three seconds—that’s how long a
space-battle lasted. Time enough to count to three, slowly, and then you’d won
or you were dead. One hit completely took care of a lightly armed and armored
little one-man craft like a scouter.

Frantically—as, unconsciously,
his dry 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 sleek, fast little scouter, about the
size of his.

And an alien ship, all right.

“Thr—” His foot touched the
bolt-release pedal—

And then the Outsider had swerved
suddenly and was off the cross-hairs. 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 toward 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. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be there. Couldn’t possibly. There
wasn’t
any planet nearer than Neptune three billion miles away —with Pluto around on
the opposite side of the distant pinpoint sun.

His
detectors! They
hadn’t
shown any object of planetary dimensions, even of asteroid dimensions. They
still didn’t.

So it couldn’t be there, that
whatever-it-was he was diving into, only a few hundred miles below him.

And in his sudden anxiety to keep
from crashing, he forgot even the Outsider ship. He fired the front braking rockets,
and even as the sudden change of speed slammed him forward against the seat
straps, he 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
toward the 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 wage a war that would exterminate one and so weaken the other that it
would retrogress and never fulfill 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 can not 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 1 prevent them from destroying one
another, and 1 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.