In that breathless second before the awful blast of sound and light struck, Curt Wing saw three shadows suddenly disappear. Then the sound and light struck as Wing steeled his muscles and mind against it. But, amazingly, at the first touch, it was gone, and he was standing unharmed.
He twisted his head. Pat was standing close beside him, and George. But Dead-Eye was gone. Only Elizabeth, her metal twisted and white hot, lay smoking on the ground where Dead-Eye had stood.
Dead-Eye, Wing's mind was crying, you big, dumb, blundering bear, where are you? Oh, you damn fool, pitting an old, crazy powder gun against atomic power! You killed yourself, you crazy, gallant guy. Now you're gone—who am I going to have to look out for after this?
Pat's fingers were soft on his arm, drawing him back from the pain of the loss. "He always wanted it that way, Curt. Quick, while he was in action."
Rage began to boil in Wing's heart against these tenuous shadows who scorned giving an Earthman even a hopeless chance. The ache for Dead Eye, who was like a big good-natured puppy; that ever-conscious nagging of the doom of mankind at the hands of these callous shadows; the knowledge that even if this doom could be somehow stopped or turned aside there was Zhan Nekel's space fleet coming nearer, churned his mind. And from his whirling brain came only one driving thought. Avenge Dead-Eye—the thousands of Dead-Eyes who never would have the chance for their simple joys and pleasures if man knuckled down under this greatest threat!
With that rage came clear thinking. Little things—like Dead-Eye's firing into the invisible wall, combustion type engines firing when cyc-powered units went dead, shadows disappearing when Elizabeth spat at them; little things, simple things.
A thought coalescing, growing sharper, until it was burning in his mind, fueling his spirit with new hope.
"Thank you, Dead-Eye," he whispered. The harsh sharp planes of Curt Wing's face were softening.
"We've got a chance," he said. "Dead-Eye gave it to us, Pat. But we've got to get away—out of this circle somehow." He waved his hands at the tight circle of shadow-things that hemmed them in. "Any ideas, George? Pat?"
Lt. George Packer's shoulders had come up, he was touched by this new assurance in Curt Wing's voice, in the fire of those dark eyes. "Not," he said, and there was new life in his voice, too, "not unless an old wish comes true and the ground swallows us up."
"It can," Pat said, the words tumbling out. "We can fall in a hole, can't we? Look at them, Curt. They shuffle along, but they don't step into holes. They just float over them—like they do belong in another dimension and can't anchor themselves to Earth. See?" Her voice rang with excitement.
Wing laughed. "But what good would falling in a hole do us? All they'd have to do is fish us out again. And we'd have new bruises." The circle was tight now, and suddenly they felt the push of an invisible wall against them as the shadow-things moved closer. Then they were moving.
Pat didn't stop arguing. "If you were a fat man and you dropped something between your feet, wouldn't you have to get your stomach out of the way to see it?"
Wing looked at her sharply. "What are you driving at, Pat?"
"If they're from another dimension, and all the telecast say they are, and if their vision devices for this world are just for straight-ahead seeing, what would they have to do in order to look down?"
"Pat," Wing said softly. "It would be like riding in a rocket car. Once something gets underneath it, out of the range of the windshield, you can't see it. You have to back up or go forward. And if we pick a deep enough hole, the shadows can't back enough or go forward enough to see the bottom. Is that what you mean? Because the high sides cut off their vision?"
Her wide smile and sparkling eyes were his answer.
Curt Wing, nursing a new set of bruises after plunging into a fifteen-foot hole and scrambling out after the shadow-things had finally floated by above them, led Pat and lanky George Packer at a loping run back to the rocket car.
It was almost nightfall and the fire and noise and stench of White City were far behind them by the time the speedy little car made it to the mountain retreat of the Council of Seven.
During the ride, Curt Wing's sense of loss with Dead-Eye gone was softening, mingling with a gratitude deep and strong to the big, black-bearded giant.
With a child's intuition for solving a problem simply, Dead-Eye and his Elizabeth had given man a chance to fight.
"A chance, Curt?" Pat had overheard his whisper. Her hand on his arm was warm and vibrant. Curt clasped his fingers softly over hers.
"Yes," he said, "if there is only time."
Jan Eliel, senior governor of the Council of Seven, pulled his red-rimmed eyes from the telecast when Curt Wing and Pat and Lt. Packer entered the consultation room.
Old as his face had stamped him those few days ago when Wing had brought the fleet back, Jan Eliel now was a broken and bent caricature of the man who held the direction of a world in his hands.
"Yes?" he asked, and the life was out of his voice.
Then he saw the four miniature earths which still glinted proudly in a row across Wing's torn and burnt tunic's left breast.
"Wing!" He rose from his seat on the telecast bench, hurried forward. "You've solved it!"
Wing shook his bandaged head. "I don't know for sure, Governor, but I think we do have a way of stopping the shadows—if there's time."
Jan Eliel ran a shaking hand through his white hair.
"I don't know. Zhan Nekel's fleet is moving faster than we thought it would, and the fleet units you smashed at the Moon have been re-organized and now are swinging toward us. That, at the most, gives us two days—and I thought we'd have at least two weeks.
"But enough of that; what is the way to stop these terrible shadows?"
Instead of answer, Wing asked:
"How much of that obsolete Twentieth century artillery is available?"
Jan Eliel's old eyes widened.
"You're mad, Curt Wing," he said wearily. "We've tried everything we have, the finest weapons, the heaviest atom machines, and we get nothing in return except our own power turned against us. Powder would be worse than useless. You can't stop atomic power with an old-fashioned shell."
"My friend Dead-Eye was killed when he proved you can," Wing said quietly.
Jan Eliel's voice was cold. He spoke quite without emotion. "You've been under too heavy a strain, Space Commander Wing. You are not the clear-headed Wing we once knew. Go back to the hospital and rest. Perhaps you will be able to bring back some semblance of sanity and help your world when she needs you most."
"Damn you," Wing said. "Can't you see it? We've been throwing atomic power at an atomic shield, so it just bounces back at us. Suppose we threw something it couldn't bounce back right away, leaving us an opening to hurl our own atomic bolts into the heart of it?"
Jan Eliel had turned his back on them, once more was watching the telecast.
What's the use, Curt Wing? Why bother when the ruler of the world won't listen to what a big, blundering guy proved when he got mad and fired an old powder gun at a shadow? He's blinded as you were not so long ago by despair. Follow Dead-Eye's lead, show him the way and he may follow.
"Come on," Wing said abruptly. "We have a job to do."
The long low barracks at the Spacers' Training school outside Washington buzzed and growled with the hundreds of blue-uniformed spacers.
There at the far end of the hall on the little platform where the sergeants took the roll, Wing stood looking at the hard-bitten, space-burned men who had been land-bound since they turned from victory to answer that fatal six-two....
They had come because their commander had offered them a fight; a little different perhaps using old-fashioned projectile weapons, but nevertheless a fight; and they, who had used space guns against the shadow-things, who had been beaten back without a chance to fight, were spoiling for battle.
Some of them were reading the hastily-printed instructions that came with the bright, shining, but outmoded weapons. Some were a little jealous of other comrades who even now were hurling their atomic bolts through the skies over Earth as they harassed the vanguard of Zhan Nekel's Mercurian fleet.
But with the pangs of jealousy they had pride in themselves, too. While their shipmates battled a known enemy, they were going out to fight against an unknown enemy with untried weapons and only the promise of their Space Commander, Curt Wing, that these weapons, three centuries old, could win where atomics had so miserably failed.
Wing raised his hand for attention.
"Some of you knew Dead-Eye and his Elizabeth. He's gone now, but he destroyed three of the shadow-things with leaden pellets from his old sixshooter before he died. He showed me the way to lick those shadows. Simply, it's this. A concentration of powder can open a hole in the atomic shield of the shadows. But in our atomic weapons we have a flow of power and it's sucked away by the shield before it can concentrate.
"In Elizabeth, Dead-Eye had concentrated power—the leaden projectile. Its comparatively inert atoms struck the shield and broke through before it could be spread out evenly over the shield.
"For a moment, the shield was out of balance. That's your job and mine—keep that shield out of balance until we can find the invaders within and destroy them.
"I realize that you've had only five days to study what these old weapons are and how they operate—but we haven't any more time. We've got to lick an enemy from outside and an enemy from within at one and the same time.
"Do you think we can do it?"
A roar of assent greeted him.
They numbered in the thousands. Space rovers of the Twenty-fourth century, moving in a long, spread out line toward the edge of the blue flower that still pulsated and grew, reaching farther and farther out from White City.
Curt Wing's heart was filled with pride—pride in these thousands who, with strange, obsolete arms, were moving against a shadowy foe equipped with weapons the like of which they'd never dreamed; pride in that unbeatable spirit and courage of man, the magnificent fool, who had lifted himself by his own bootstraps from the caves of Earth to the vast reaches of the stars!
It was Curt Wing's powder gun which opened the attack when they struck against the invisible force barrier.
In the dawn light, all up and down that long thin line, the powder guns began snapping and crackling. Tommy guns, rifles and revolvers hurled their slugs at the wall.
The long line kept moving forward. Wing snapped on the portable radio phone strapped across his chest, and at his words, far behind him, a dozen space cruisers—those which could be spared from the battle against the Mercurians above Earth—rose and soon were scintillating in the rays of a sun still hidden by the rim of Earth.
As the line of marching men strode forward, the cruisers, their rocket motors vibrating the air, circled high above them.
The line reached the edge of the flower—and the intensity of the firing increased until it was the steady roll of a thousand drums.
Wing spoke into the phone again as the flower grew bluer along the edge. The blue deepened and deepened until it was almost black. Then Wing spoke into the phone once more.
The circling cruisers steadied. Their blue bolts spat at the blackness.
The shock of it could be seen for miles in the blue flower. The shield blackened in scattered spots. Where every black spot showed, the bolts from the Earth ships lashed.
The terrible power unleashed inside the shield began to show as the flower shrunk back into itself.
The ground smoked and trembled as it emerged from the retreating force field; great fissures opened and the ground trembled and shook as if in the grip of an earthquake.
Wing snapped a halt order to the captains on either side of him and the word moved rapidly down the line.
Bracing themselves against the shock of the quake, they waited.
It wasn't for long.
In the brightening day ahead of them, on the leveled plain behind them, the Earthmen saw the shadow-things approaching, their power bolts lashing out ahead of them. Every other man turned, so that half of them faced the shadows ahead and half the shadows behind.
The powder guns crashed, and the steel and lead and copper pellets whined a song of death in the ranks of the shadows.
The mist things exploded and disappeared as the multi-shaped spawn of Dead-Eye's Elizabeth struck their shields.
Like puncturing a kid's balloon with a needle, Curt Wing thought. He was laughing now—man had risen once again from the dust. No longer need he despair. He had been stopped only momentarily in his climb toward destiny. After this unbelievable enemy, the Mercurians would be, perhaps not simply, but finally, hurled back to their hell-pot planet.
It was a tired and weary Curt Wing who threaded his way through the smoking ash of what had been one of the mightiest of Earth cities. He moved toward the church, which stood so remarkably untouched by the tremendous forces which had been unleashed within the blue flower.
The two powder-burned and dirty spacemen who flanked the steel portals saluted him as he walked tiredly up the stone steps.
"Who phoned me?" Wing asked.
The redhead at the left of the portal saluted.
"I did, Commander. Jack and I saw this thing and we peeked inside and saw that funny light, so we thought we'd better call you."
Wing moved through the steel portals, stood in the quiet hush of the church. There, just before the altar rail was the curious blue light—like a hexagon of blue.
He walked slowly toward it and as he approached, the altar behind it seemed to fade away and he was looking into a silver hallway.
He halted within a foot of it. It was like looking through a doorway—why, it is a doorway, the doorway to the world these invaders came from!
He unsheathed the revolver, spun the cylinder to see that it was loaded, and with only a glimpse over his shoulder at the two spacemen silhouetted in the church doorway, he stepped through.
It was like stepping through fire—a fire that clawed and tore at the heart of him—but it lasted only a moment.
The hallway in which he found himself was of silver, tiny overlapping bits of silver plating that rippled and cast off flashes of light. He walked slowly ahead to the other doorway he saw before him.
Framed in the door, he looked above him, through a glass roof, up into a strange star-studded night sky.
Where is this world? Curt Wing wondered. Have I crossed a thousand, a million or a trillion light years to come here?
He looked down from the night sky and the vastness of the transparent roof reached as far his eyes could see.
It was only a whisper in his mind at first—then it grew stronger until it was as if his ears were hearing it.
"You're a man," the thought said. Curt Wing's dark eyes cast about for the source of it.
"You're a man," the emotionless thought repeated. "That is why we could not beat you. We are a dying race, trapped on a dying world. You are young and have your destiny still before you."
"Who are you?" Wing's mind called out. "Where are you?"
"We were never beaten until now. We knew that to survive this dying system we must fight across eternity to find another sun and another system. We started from mud and slime like you, and some day you too must come to this—the end of your destiny.
"You will fight as we have fought. We built a machine to warp space. For centuries our scientists labored to perfect it, just as other technicians created a space scanner to find a world suitable to us."
Curt Wing was trembling as he listened. Somehow, the measured cadence of those cold thoughts was fingering his heart, bringing a chill to it.
"We found your world—the world of man, Earth, but we didn't know it until now.
"We made a mistake—a mistake which is destroying us but will in your far distant future destroy you."
"A mistake?" Wing's mind asked.
"Yes, those scientists of ours who labored so hard and long, built a machine not to warp space, as we all thought, but to warp time.
"You see, Space Commander Curt Wing, we, too, are men. We were fighting our past, you your future on Earth, our common home. In attacking your world, we have destroyed ourselves."
"But why?" Wing's mind started to ask.
"You saw us merely as shadows, did you not? That's all you were to us, too. Shadows; but very, very stubborn. Never in our recorded history had we met such a stubborn and such an able foe. No wonder. We were fighting against ourselves.
"It's time to go, Curt Wing, before the time door closes and locks you forever here."
Man to climb so far into the stars and to die by his own hand, Wing was thinking bitterly.
"Do not despair," the thought intruded. "What is done is done, and nothing can be changed."
"Wait," Wing cried out. "We beat you because a big, dumb guy by the name of Dead-Eye had the quiet faith that we could. He showed us the way.
"Dead-Eye said," and the words came from his memory like a prayer, "don't worry, Cap. Shucks, they can't be tough enough to lick us. Earthmen always fight better when the going's rough. Why, we'll knock 'em dead.
"Take hope from Dead-Eye's words. We were in the depths of despair when he uttered them, and we came up that long, terrible road to hope. We licked our problem. You, because you, too, are men, can lick yours."
There was nothing in the emotionless thought that answered him, that told they were heartened.
Curt Wing turned his back on Man's future, walked down the silver hallway, through the hexagonal door to his own world. He stepped out in the quiet hush of the church.
He saw the two spacers still staring in as he walked out of the darkness of the church into the brightness of day.
One of the spacers called out:
"Commander, the light's fading!"
The shouted words echoed in his ears as he strode down the steps.
The light's fading....Like hell it was! Somehow those future men would find a way. Wasn't it man's way to thumb his nose at impossibilities and forge ahead?
Space Commander Curt Wing's shoulders straightened. He lengthened his stride. He did not look back.