As Doug marched, he thought.
There was less than an hour yet of marching to complete the great circle, to devise a plan.
Two boys in five hundred thousand. An impersonation now demanding so complex a knowledge of the situation of which it was the center that to carry it to successful conclusion would be impossible. Even a moment's belief otherwise was rank stupidity. Escape? Yes, by himself somehow, perhaps he could escape in one of the two sleek ships even now being serviced on the plaza; that had been the basis for his original plan. But the plan was junk now. Junk, unless he could find Terry and Mike first. Two boys, in a half-million!
Aircraft were being rolled out on the plaza. The immense aircraft in which he and Tayne would fly as they directed the maneuvers of their quadrants, and the aircraft of the tabulation and evacuation specialists. They were huge, and there were fully a hundred of them. But for all their size and number, they offered no hope. It was like being in a nightmare wherein one had to run for life, but the ground beneath was a sucking, miring bog.
His reason hinted temptingly that the voice he had heard might well not have been that of his son. How many voices were there in all creation that were precise echoes of each other? Thousands? Millions, even. But among them, there was of course theone. And he must know. He had to know.
The Contraption. Again, what had it done? It had transmitted himself and Dot into their physical counterparts on a parallel time-track. If the blue glow of the contraption had touched Terry and Mike, then they too would have been transmitted. But because they had not appeared in the cellar when the transmission was complete, he and Dot had assumed that they had been just outside the Contraption's limited range.
That was it, of course—the cellar. That was what had thrown them off, confused their logic. Through some quirk of coincidence, the other Blair, Senior Quadrate Blair and his wife had been in their cellar at the time of the switch. Had they been anywhere else—anywhere else at all, even just upstairs, the mistake in logic would not have been made. And if Madame Blair had no sons, Terry and Mike would not have been transmitted at all. But Quadrate and Madame Blair had had sons. Two, ten years old. He remembered when Tayne had told him of their transfer from his quadrant to Tayne's own.... Ordered by Gundar Tayne, Director. He remembered. He remembered how thankful he had been that they had not been his. But now—now, fantastically, they were. Because when the switch happened, Ronal and Kurt Blair had not been in the cellar. They had been on Venus.
But it was too much, the coincidences—the marriage of two counterparts; their children, same sex, same age.
And then he remembered what he had told Grayson so terribly long ago.There's a million possible results when you go fooling around with the structure of the universe, Carl...
Thousands of voices in the universe that were exact echoes of each other. But Terry and Mike were here, and there was no doubting that. And in Tayne's quadrate, the one beside which he was even now marching. Oh, he was doing well with his thinking! He had narrowed the field down to a trifling two hundred fifty thousand!
And he knew that by any direct means that would not arouse Tayne's too-willing suspicion, it was as far down as he would narrow it.
Indirect, then.... Somehow, through Tayne himself, perhaps. Tayne had his boys. Tayne's brother had seen to that, with of course no reason given. Pressure—simple pressure. Doug wondered if the pressure was supposed to break him. He wondered what Tayne's reaction would be—and his brother's—if it did not. Easy enough to guess. If his sons' deaths at Tayne's careful arrangement were not enough to break him, shatter him, make him throw down his office, then the corpses of Kurt and Ronal—Terry and Mike—would somehow end up on the battle area occupied by his quadrant, far enough behind the front lines of fighting to convince any martial court that he had violated the Director's order, had obviously at the last moment brought his sons back within his own quadrant, where they might be in some measure protected.
That was how it would be. If the pressure was not enough, then a simple frame. A simple matter of good timing. Yet if the timing should, by some miracle, go wrong....
If the timing went wrong! God there it was!
Suddenly, the blood was pounding through his body, throbbing in the large veins at his throat. Five minutes more and this thing would end. Three hundred seconds, four hundred strides. Then the final salute as the Prelate General left as he had come. And then thirty minutes for deployment, and the games on the northern mass would begin.
But before those thirty minutes started.... It must be done just as the Prelate General's ship disappeared into the white syrup of the sky. It must be done just before the order to break ranks to prepare for combat deployment.
And then of course it would be a gamble at best. But it was a chance, where before there had been no chance at all.
Five hundred thousand swords flashed in final salute as the Prelate General's glittering ship leapt skyward, trailing a satisfactorily impressive wake of flame and thunder as it ascended into invisibility. And the sprawling headquarters building was at once denuded of its steeple. The Director had taken his place in the balcony. Divinity had withdrawn, entrusting its mission at length to the obedient officer of its lay hosts.
The swords were sheathed. And in a moment, the Director of the games would signal dismissal.
Now!
Suddenly, Doug was striding from his post at the point of the flying wedge, the thin flanks of which still joined the two quadrants, heading unerringly for a point directly before the balcony itself. And as suddenly he stopped, stiffly raised his open palm in salute. His cloak fluttered in the warm breeze.
"Your Very Grand Excellence! Senior Quadrate Blair wishes to report a suspected breach of command!" And he held his breath, but not intentionally, for suddenly breath would not come.
His salute was returned. And the field behind him was again still as though carven from stone.
"Report, Quadrate!"
He mustered all the wavering strength in his body, for each word must be crisp, clear, strong and flowing with confidence.
"Your Very Grand Excellence, it has come to this officer's attention that there exists the possibility of failure to execute a quadrant reassignment as prescribed in your command of June 3, in which Ronal Blair and Kurt Blair, identification numbers 28532 and 28533, were ordered transferred from the quadrant which I command to that of Quadrate Tayne. In order that such a failure be rectified at once if, in actuality, it has transpired, I request permission to order an immediate inspection of the units concerned!"
His muscles were rigid and his throat felt like so much wadded sandpaper. Everything hinged on what happened now. Everything.
"In the interests of military efficiency and discipline, your unprecedented request must be granted, Quadrate Blair. I will expect, however, a full report in writing concerning the basis of your suspicion of such failure at your earliest convenience. Order the inspection; you may have ten minutes!"
"At once, sir!"
He saluted, about-faced, and strode, the single animate figure in a great open amphitheater of statues, toward the Post Tayne held behind his own. And as he walked the foreboding silence was suddenly shattered by the roar of starting aircraft engines. The tabulation and evacuation planes, readying for warm-up flights, last-minute terrain checks. There was so little time. And the Director's flat, superbly confident tone had been enough to tell him that only a naive fool could hope to win. In it there had been no trace of surprise, no trace of suspicion, no trace of hesitation. It could mean that he was already beaten. Or, there was the thread-slim chance that it meant the Director had seen no threat in the request to the subtle plan against him. For, regardless of the inspection's outcome, the sons of Quadrate Blair would end up where they belonged, under Quadrate Tayne. And so the plan would thence go forward.
But for the record, the Director had demanded a report!
A report, Doug knew, which one way or the other, he would never write.
Somewhere behind him a flight of tab planes thundered into the air.
And then suddenly, he was facing Tayne, and it was time to play out the gamble to the end.
"Quadrate Tayne, in order to satisfy the Director and myself that the transfer of my sons to your quadrant has been effected as ordered by the Director's command dated June 3, you will order forward for inspection the unit within your quadrant to which they were assigned."
"Yes, sir."
Tayne pivoted.
"Divisions Six and Eighteen, forward—march!" Again, the familiar relay of command. Then the two great masses surged forward, one behind the other, leaving the two behind them still in formation. "Six by the left flank, march!" Six had cleared the quadrant formation, moved off as commanded to the left. "Eighteen by the right flank, march!" And Eighteen did the same. "Divisions, halt! Six, right, face! Eighteen, left, face!" And as quickly as Tayne's commands were relayed, the way was methodically cleared for the rear rank division he called next. There were perhaps seven minutes left.... "Division Thirty forward, march!"
And it came forward, and Doug realized at once that in this formation, this Division Thirty, were his sons, if they were anywhere among the five hundred thousand at all.
"Division, halt!" A second flight of evac ships roared over them, and Tayne waited. Six minutes.... "'A' Company, First Battalion, Second Regiment, forward—" This time, the unit Tayne wanted was in the very front, and at once, two hundred boys were separated from a division of over five thousand, as the division itself had been picked from among forty-eight others in a quadrant of a quarter-million.
And then—
"Squad leaders Kurt and Ronal Blair,front center!" And from the squads of a rear platoon, two bare-torsoed, helmeted youngsters rushed forward on the double!
They halted three paces from Tayne, saluted. And to Doug, their young faces were completely unrecognizable.
Curiously pinched, worried young faces, drawn taut with the tension of bewilderment and sudden fear.
Tayne pivoted, faced Doug.
"Sir, Kurt and Ronal Blair, as assigned by command! At your orders, sir!"
Doug returned the salute, said nothing. He walked with a careful nonchalance to where the two boys, swords and maces still swinging at their sides, stood at attention. Their arms rose in salute. There was no sign of recognition in their eyes.
He dared linger near them but a moment, the fleeting moment it would take for him to identify his own sons beyond doubt. And again, it would be a matter of timing. For until the right moment, Tayne could hear every word.
"How long have you boys been in your present unit?"
"Since—since June the third I think, sir." Terry's voice. And it was Terry's way of saying words. It was Terry, and it was Mike beside him.
But he remained silent. He waited, and he prayed.
The silence drew into seconds, and it was deadly.
And then suddenly a third flight of evac ships thundered their paen of power as they fought for altitude above him!
And with the prayer still at his lips lest his words be either too loud or drowned altogether, Doug shouted almost in their faces: "Terry, Mike! It's Dad! The Contraption's done all of this! Watch for me—I'll pick you up off the field!"
Their eyes were suddenly wide but the roar was already subsiding. He had managed about twenty quick words. He turned to Tayne. And Tayne's sword was not drawn. On his face was the masked look of hatred, but not the unveiled one of sudden comprehension. He had not heard....
"My sons, without doubt, Quadrate. You may order them to fall in, and reform your ranks. You shall receive my apology of record as soon as practicable."
He saluted stiffly and took his post at the apex of the wedge.
Tayne bellowed his commands for the reformation of his quadrant between the fourth and fifth ascending flights of tab and evac planes. And then, once again, there was the fantastic tableau of helmeted statues.
And through the speakers came the Director's command to deploy for combat.
As their quadrants were marched off to take the field under the ground command of the Junior Quadrates of the headquarters cadre, Doug and Tayne were escorted by an honor guard of cadets to the hangar-sections of the headquarters building where their command planes waited in the dank heat, engines idling. Huge aircraft, powerful, but not built for speed. Propeller-driven instead of jet, and the reason was obvious enough—the great, broad-winged craft had been designed for observation, not pursuit. Although there was no sign of a rotor assembly on either ship, Doug knew that for all their size, they were capable, in the thick atmosphere of Venus, of hovering at very little more than the speed of a slow human run. Everything, planned to the last detail. Everything, irrevocably woven into the unchangeable fabric of destiny itself.
The last half of what little plan he had remained only partially within the pattern, and after that, it would simply be a race between fugitive and pursuer—a fully-committed race between hunter and hunted. Nothing more, he knew, than a desperate attempt at escape where there could be no escape. But at least there would be the brief, red-hot satisfaction of trying—there was always that, when there was nothing else....
It would be simple. As Senior Quadrate, his was the duty of over-seeing the campaign not only of his own quadrant, but that of Tayne, Vladkow, Klauss. His was the prerogative of flying his ship over or landing it among any of the troops, wherever they fought. He could land in any quadrant—in Tayne's quadrant. The detailed campaign maps, kept in constant conformation with each phase of the battle as it progressed by picked tabulation personnel, would show him where to land. Wherever he found A Company, First Battalion, Second Regiment, Division Thirty.... And if the boys had understood, they would be watching, waiting. And after that, back to the plaza, the ship, with the prayer that its return trajectory was already plotted, its autorobot already reset for the return journey to Earth.
That was where he must break the pattern. That was when the hopeless, foolish race would begin.
And inwardly, Doug smiled an ironic, tight little smile. So funny, so tragically funny. A down-to-Earth, practical man like Congressman Douglas Blair, running for his life from a fantasy that could not possibly exist! As the people of Hiroshima had run on the day of the atomic bomb....
Their cloaks started to whip in the slipstreams of the waiting aircraft. Another ten strides and he would have been aboard the plane.
But before he had taken five of them, the speeding surface-vehicle had drawn up beside them and stopped scant feet short of the plane's opening port. Cadremen leapt from it, swords drawn. And behind them came the Director himself.
The formation halted as though it had suddenly struck an invisible wall.
As he walked between his flanks of guards, the hulking Gundar Tayne drew his own sword. And Doug knew what the gesture meant.
"Senior Quadrate Blair, as lawful husband of Madame Lisa Blair, who was taken into custody by the S-Council of Earth at 1300 hours Earth Standard Time today, I hereby place you under official arrest. Guards! Disarm this man."
Doug stood motionless as his dress sword was whipped from its scabbard, snapped across the bent knee of one of the Director's guards, and cast at his feet. A second denuded him of the wide belt and narrow scabbard which had held it.
"Sir, unless you are able to cite well-founded charges for this outrageous action, I can assure you it will be reported to the Prelate General at once!" Doug bit the words out knowing that as a defensive threat they were hopelessly impotent, but he had to know what they had done to Dot. He had to know that even if they were to kill him within the next second. He sensed Tayne's presence behind him, could all but feel his sword-point at his back. The cadets, a moment before formed as a guard of honor, were suddenly in a bristling ring about him as though from some melodrama from the pages of Roman history. Their faces were impassive, their feet wide-spread, their swords hip-high, and pointed unwaveringly at him.
And the sneer in the Director's voice was only carelessly concealed.
"This is hardly the time for jests, Quadrate. I hardly think I need quote the Commandment sub-section setting forth the law concerning the status of husband and wife when either is found guilty of heresy. Your rank permits you to deny your wife's collusion if you wish, but—unfortunately, Madame Blair has been unquestionably linked with one of the pitiful but vicious little underground groups of men and women whose constant and sole aim is not only to abolish the war games, but to accomplish the eventual destruction of our sacred government. She—as well as yourself, I might add—has been under painstaking scrutiny for almost a year. I am informed that a carefully guarded but all too unwise series of tele-calls to your home has at last established the necessary link. Ever hear of the Saint Napoleon Culture Society, Quadrate? No? No, of course you haven't! Quadrate Tayne!"
"Yes, your Very Grand Excellence!"
"I'm putting this man in your custody for the trip to Earth. Your orders are to deliver him in person to the S-Council—you'll take-off immediately. The games will be under my personal supervision until you return. Any questions?"
"I am to deliver this man in person to the S-Council. No questions, sir."
"Carry on, then." He returned Tayne's salute with a perfunctory dip of his sword-point, then sheathed the weapon and followed Doug into the waiting vehicle.
Take-off black-out was but momentary and wore off quickly. Escaping Venus' lesser gravity was noticeably easier, and the fog-shrouded planet still filled the viewscreen when Doug got to his feet. He was half surprised to discover that there were no steel cuffs at his wrists, and that he had not been bound other than by the safety belts to the acceleration hammock. But it was logical enough. A robot-guided ship in Space was quite efficiently escape-proof. It had been an effective trap before, and now it was an equally effective prison. And Tayne, who had already opened trajectory compensation communications with Venus headquarters, was the one who had the sword.
Tayne's back was to him. A sudden leap—
No. With Tayne unconscious or dead, it would make little difference. His presence aboard the ship was apparently only for the satisfaction of protocol. Placed aboard it alone, Doug reasoned, he would have been as well secured a prisoner as had he been accompanied by a guard of one hundred men. It was not Tayne, but the autorobot guiding the ship that was his jailer. Yet, Tayne had not removed his sword....
Doug watched the white mass of Venus as it receded with torturing slowness in the screen, let it half-hypnotize him. There was something stirring uneasily somewhere far back in his brain—something, something—but it did not matter. Nothing at all mattered now. The race—the great, hopeless race he had planned for freedom had never even begun!
They had denied him even that satisfaction. Yes, he could attack Tayne, and Tayne would kill him. But that would not be a fight. It would be simply the choice of suicide, at the hands of the man who would derive the most satisfaction from being its prime instrument. The man who already signed the death warrants for Mike and Terry....
And Dot. Dot, after some awful agony would see him again perhaps, but she would see with uncomprehending eyes, hear with unrecognizing ears. If she lived through what they did to her, she would no longer be Dot at all.
Dully, he could hear Tayne's words in a background that was a thousand miles away. "Reconciled and steady as she blasts. This is QT to Control, C-Limit check—trajectory secure. Out."
And again, there was something far back in Doug's brain, struggling harder....
Then even as Tayne turned toward him from the dial consoles, it burst into the forefront of his mind like a flare in the darkness.Twelve hundred Kemps at three hundred milliamperes, sir.... Genemotor, type A-26-F modified.... Sergeant! The neuro-tablets at once.... Commandments Four, Part 3, Sub-section 12 as amended ... all space craft shall be robot-controlled and shall fly predetermined trajectories, save (1) when bearing members of the Science Council and/or their certified representatives, to whom manual operation and navigation at will is singularly permissible, or (2) when insurmountable emergency shall occur....
And suddenly, Doug's brain vaulted from the lethargy of hopelessness and it was again at his command, a sharp, poised weapon of battle.For Tayne knew! Yet he would die before he would tell—unless, somehow....
"Such confidence, Quadrate Tayne! Admirable! But you would look so much more fit for your role with your sword in your hand, not in your scabbard!"
Tayne reddened. "If it were not for my orders, Blair—"
"Why, such a lack of conditioning, Quadrate! Don't you know killing me is supposed to be so repulsive to you that you couldn't even stomach the thought of it? Tell me, don't I make you sick, Quadrate?"
Tayne's hand went to the hilt of his weapon. He half-drew it, slammed it back in its scabbard.
"Blair, we have twenty hours aboard this ship together. We can be at each other's throats like children. Or not, as you please."
Doug sat down on the edge of the acceleration hammock. Perhaps it would not be so difficult. Carefully, he entered the role further. He must have just the right kind of smile.
"Ah, but think of all the trouble I can get you in if I make you lose your temper and kill me! And you have got to admit, where I'm going, it doesn't make much difference—to me, I mean."
Tayne turned back to the instrument panel as though to signify that he had suddenly become a deaf man. And Doug kept talking, as though to signify a complete lack of interest in whether Tayne was a deaf man or not.
"As the matter stands, they took my sword away. So you'd never get anywhere with a self-defense alibi. Lord, how they'd make you sweat! By Saint Napoleon's mother I like the thought of that! And, after all, since this is going to be my last flight, I really think I'm entitled to a little amusement."
Silence.
"You know, Quadrate," Doug kept on relentlessly, "I don't imagine you expected even me to act like this, did you? No, of course not. Not very much the officer and gentleman. But that makes us more or less even. You don't know what a gentleman is. You're so stupid you don't even know who the next President of the United States is going to be!—Oh, sorry. I keep forgetting—I don't think I ever told you that I'm not the real Senior Quadrate Blair, and that I'm not from your universe at all, did I, Tayne? Ever hear of the World Series? Oh, there I—"
Tayne turned his head.
"Easy does it! I imagine you must think I've gone mad. Don't blame you. I don't act at all like the Blair you know. Of course if I am mad, you'd better be careful. And if I am from another universe, you'd better be even more careful. As a matter of fact, at the moment, Quadrate, your life may not be worth very much."
Doug rubbed his fingernails on his tunic, inspected their new sheen. Then he looked up at Tayne.
Tayne stood, face mottled, an uneasy little thread of uncertainty deep under the surface of his eyes.
"Very well, just to make it easy for you, Mr. Tayne, we shall say I am mad, because that's easy to believe, and I can see you're quite sure of it already. Yet just the same I can outwit you, Quadrate. That is, I think that in the twenty hours of our flight together I can reduce you to a gibbering idiot, far worse off than myself! Why, I may even have you mumbling that you're Saint Napoleon himself! Now wouldn't that be a picture!" Blair slapped his right hand to his tunic-front.
And Tayne drew his sword.
"If you killed me, Quadrate, you would have no proof of my madness for the others—and I'm sure that our standing enmity would be reasoned as the far more credible motive. Reasonable people, yours. Very. So much so that they're all above making a rather ridiculous harangue like this. Face the S-Council rather stoically, I should imagine. Quietly, as befits their dignity.Right?"
Tayne almost jumped clear of the deck.
"By jingo, you're nervous, man! Sweating, too. And twenty more hours. Let's see—what'll we talk about?"
Tayne was tense, immobile, undisguisedly confused.
"I bet you're thinking that if you could get me in a state of—shall we say, unconsciousness, your troubles would be over. But you'd have to get close to me to do that. And we both know that sword of yours is no threat. Besides, I'm a madman. Either mad, or from another universe—ha!—and then I might be able to kill you with a glance! Of course, you can suppose this is all just an act, but even if I told you it was you wouldn't be exactly sure, would you? Would you, now?"
Tayne sheathed the sword. And slowly, as though he had reached some desperate decision, he turned to the control panels. But not to the ones at which he'd stood before. He touched one of a row of white studs above which were the words S-C ONLY. And a rectangle of metal hardly more than a foot in length and half as much in width slid back beneath his fingertips, exposing a compact console of control keys.
Or (2) when an insurmountable emergency should occur....
Tayne was pressing buttons, and Doug knew that the trajectory had been broken, and that the ship was free of its autorobot and under Tayne's sole command.
The manual control console. Tayne had had enough! Were he an Earthman as Doug was an Earthman—but he was not! He was a creature of pattern, and there was only the pattern to follow. And an 'insurmountable emergency' had indeed arisen. Flight with a madman who spoke of other universes, and who, by definition of orders, dare not be killed.
Doug, still seated, braced his feet on the hammock's bottom edge, and checked his spring even with his muscles tensed.
For Tayne turned suddenly. And the fear, the confusion were gone!
"Thank you, Quadrate Blair!" he said. "Madman, I am convinced—yet brilliant to the last! I admit, I may not have thought of our personal enmity as a motive for my actions—as a motive, I mean, that would justify them!"
Something turned to ice in Doug's stomach. It was going wrong, somehow.
Tayne drew the sword slowly. "I shall kill you now. You see, you hated me so much that I am afraid your hatred broke its bounds. And you not only attacked me but—but I'm afraid you also attempted to take over manual control of the ship in your madness. And for that of course—"
The sword was descending even as Doug launched his body from the hammock.
They went down then, and the sword clattered from Tayne's grasp. The blade-edge was speckled with red, and there was a searing pain across Doug's back. But his hands were on Tayne's throat, and they were closing.
And then they opened. The whistle of air into Tayne's lungs as he fought for breath and for consciousness told Doug he had only seconds before there was full life in the Quadrate's body again.
But the seconds were enough, for within them, he had the sword's hilt firmly in his own hand. And then he had its tip at the Quadrate's swollen, pulsing throat.
"You damn near threw me off schedule, Grand Imperial Wizard. Come on get up."
Doug felt little rivulets of blood trickle down his spine. The wound still stung, but it was not deep.
Slowly, Tayne rose, the sword-point beneath his chin.
"Don't make me nervous," Doug said. "Sudden moves get me all jittery, and sometimes when I'm jittery I kill stuffed shirts just to ease the tension. Back up. Now around—slow, Noble Grand Knight, or you'll fall down without your head." The sword-point traced a thin line of red half-way around Tayne's neck as the man turned. "Now we're going to have some fun—only wish you were a tax-writer and I'd get a bigger kick out of this. Venus, James. And at the first peculiar maneuver—such as maybe cutting out the pseudograv or dumping us on the carpet without enough back-blast and your nice uniform will get all gooked up. Blood, you know." He dug the point deeper into Tayne's flesh until some of it was red, the rest white with pain.
And again, there was nothing to do but play the gamble out. How brave, Doug wondered, was a creature of pattern?
Venus filled the viewscreen, the white sea of the planet's sky stretching unruffled beneath them.
"Northern land mass, Tayne. Your Quadrant. Thirtieth Division, Second Regiment, First Battalion, Company 'A'."
Tayne still said nothing. Doug kept the steady pressure on the sword point.
The round, black buttons were arranged like an inverted T. Beneath them were three square, flush-set dials. One was easily recognizable as an artificial horizon-ecliptic indicator. The second, Doug thought, indicated both plus and minus acceleration. And the third, simple velocity and altitude.
Tayne's fingers had not punched the buttons, but had played them almost as though they were the keys of a musical instrument. The horizontal row was for change of direction to either left or right. The vertical, change in axial thrust, for either upward accelerations or forward, depending upon flight attitude. A slow turn executed by pressing the buttons of desired intensity of power in both horizontal and vertical columns simultaneously, with turn sharpness simply a matter of coordinated button selection.
The top button was for full thrust—full speed in level flight, blast-off from take-off position, or full deceleration in landing attitude. Those below it were for power in progressively lesser amounts. A twist of a fingertip would lock any of the buttons at any degree of power output desired. With practiced co-ordination, simple enough. Yet—what about climb or dip from the horizontal? Or inversion for landing? That was something for which he must wait.
The cut across his back throbbed now, and he dared not brush his hands across his eyes to smear the sweat from them.
And suddenly, Tayne's voice grated, "You had better drop the sword, Blair." There was the tightness of pain in his words, but they were clear. "I refuse to invert the ship. If we are to land, it must be inverted in sixty seconds. If you kill me, you kill yourself, for you do not know how to operate the panel beyond what you have seen—and you have not seen the operation for inversion. If you give me the sword, you will land alive."
"You're out of your head, Mr. Tayne! I'm Senior Quadrate Blair, remember? I know how to operate the panel as well or better than you do. Get going!" He dug the tip deeper, and fresh blood started.
But, Tayne's fingers remained immobile.
"Mad or sane, Senior Quadrate Blair or—or something else, if you knew how to use the panel, you would not have taken the risk of forcing me to do it! I would already be dead—"
There was a sudden, empty space in Doug's stomach.
"Thirty seconds, Blair."
The white mass of the sky was scant miles below them. He would need all of the thirty seconds, and there was no time to think—only time to realize that if he were to live, he must kill Tayne. It was like that time so long ago on the beaches of Normandy....
With all his strength he plunged the sword through Tayne's neck. And his own hands were at the control panel before Tayne's gurgling corpse had slumped to the deck. The life-blood seeped from it far more slowly than the seconds slipped beneath Doug's taut fingers.
Not the buttons, not the dials, for he had seen them. But part of the panel itself—it had to be!
The panelitself!
He pressed one side, the other. Nothing. Ten seconds perhaps....
The bottom or the top next. But which? If it moved on a lateral axis—that would be it, for elevation or depression from the horizontal! But to accomplish what would amount to a half-loop....
He pressed the top of the panel. And it gave beneath his touch. In the viewscreen, the white mass which rushed to envelop him seemed to shift—
Further down—that was it, all the way around!
Slowly, against an unseen source of pressure, he revolved the panel a half-revolution about its lateral axis. Already he could see its reverse side—on it in the same pattern there was an identical set of control buttons, dials.
In the viewscreen there was a half-second's glimpse of the blackness of Space before the inverted ship tumbled tail-first into the white ocean of the Venus sky.
And again there was the awful sensation of falling through infinity. Desperately, he pushed the top button.
He locked the top button at full depression and struggled to keep his legs straight beneath him, braced as they were now against a bulkhead which but a few minutes before had been, not a floor, but a wall. The ship's gyro system was no longer functioning as a pseudograv unit, but rather as a vertical stabilizer, and the second dial said four gravities.
The acceleration needle dropped with agonizing slowness. Four gravities, three point seven. The altimeter said one hundred thousand feet, then ninety thousand, eighty, seventy-five.
Three point five gravities. Three point three. Even three at last.
Fifty thousand feet, forty-five, forty-two, forty thousand.
Two point six gravities.
Thirty-five thousand.
Two. One point nine. Point eight, seven, six, five.
Twenty-three thousand.
One gravity.
And the ship was hovering balanced by her gyros, at twenty-one thousand feet above boundless reaches of Venusian sea.
Gingerly, Doug pressed the top of the panel, released the top button.
There was a sickening drop as from somewhere deep inside the ship new sets of engines rumbled automatically to life as her nose came down, her belly-jets belching, breaking the drop on their cushion of power. And again the craft hovered, but now horizontally.
Tayne's corpse tumbled grotesquely off the bulkhead to the deck, made Doug miss his footing, and he fell.
But nothing happened. The panel, without pressure, had returned automatically to zero setting, and the belly-jets held steady.
Swiftly then, cursing himself for his awkwardness, Doug tore at Tayne's cloak, the blood-soaked tunic beneath it. Somewhere he must have it—logically, he must have it.
Something crackled. Doug smeared stinging sweat from his eyes as he bent closer, found the neatly-hidden pocket, thrust a hand inside.
It was hard to keep the thin, bound packet of wide plastisheets steady. Clumsily, he flicked to blank pages of Tayne's unused record tablet. In those he had examined at his office the campaign maps had been in the back.
And he found them there.Estimated deployment, Phase One, First Hour.
No good ... two, perhaps three hours had elapsed. Gamble on Phase Three.
Division Thirty, Second Regiment, First Battalion, 'A' Company. There.
He stood up, locked a deep breath inside him, and placed his fingers on the inverted T of control buttons for a second time.
North was the top of the viewscreen. What shown in it then must slide from the top down.
His fingertip caressed the bottom-most button. And there was a gentle surge of acceleration, and the screen picture was moving diagonally. First button on the right....
The picture swung slowly around. And then it was moving from top to bottom of the screen. He pushed the bottom button all the way in, and the velocity needles swung slowly up. A touch on the button above it, and the needle quivered five hundred ten.
And then on the horizon there was suddenly a light blue blur, and he braced himself against the shock of forward acceleration as he pushed the button all the way in. Its limit was close to two thousand miles per hour, and he locked it there.
Moments later he released it, eased pressure on it as the blue blur shaped itself into the coastline of the northern land mass. Gradually, he depressed the panel a full ninety degrees.
And the hurtling craft swung again on her blazing tail. Doug let the panel return to zero and held the bottom button in. The belly-jets had automatically cut out, and again he hovered, sinking slightly, this time not above the dark blue waste of the Venusian sea, but above the place where fantastic young armies with ten-year-old soldiers were writhing, dying.
The altimeter needle showed five thousand feet, and already he was able to discern the battle-lines of the two quadrants, no longer in close marching formation, but now spread wide to cover an irregular area of more than one hundred square miles. The lines surged first forward then back, as though joined in some Gargantuan tug-of-war—shifted, changed, like a great wounded serpent in its death-throes.
The lines were little more than a hundred yards in depth because deployment for the games provided for no rear echelons—there were only the battle echelons, with their ends defended mightily against encirclement, attack from the rear.
Eventually, Doug knew, the flank defenses of both lines would give way, and the centers of each would rupture, and then, until the hovering tab and evac planes gave the signal that the Phase Three limit had been reached, the battle would wage in a great undulating mass, without formation, without plan, without reason. He had to reach Mike and Terry before then, for once the lines disintegrated into Final Phase—deployment at will—they'd be lost to him for good.
And Phase Three lasted at best for three hours. Final Phase, when it begun, would last as many days.
Somehow, he had to jockey the hovering ship over the area where the map-estimate indicated that Mike and Terry would be fighting. And when he landed, he must somehow halt the carnage momentarily—just long enough for them to see him, to run....
Doug tilted the great ship at an angle of about seventy degrees, compensated it on the main drive and the single bank of bow belly-jets that automatically checked in as the ship left vertical balance. And the terrain below him moved slowly, canted oddly between horizon and sky.
Slowly, toward the area designated on the map—slowly, sinking slightly, so that he could see their faces now, watch as their maces shattered the glittering helmets into junk, smashed into living flesh, as their broadswords glistened red and swung, struck....
Momentarily hypnotized by the horror that screamed below him and by the sickening realization that what he saw was real even though his reason rebelled through force of habit from admission that such reality could exist, Doug watched the tilted battlefield as it stretched but hundreds of feet below him now, watched as a smoothly-oiled, carefully calculated device preserved the peace of a planet.
A small, sweating body was hewn in two.
A helmeted head fell; an arm dropped grotesquely beside it.
A boy's boot was bathed in blood as he kicked viciously at his opponent's chest to withdraw his sword from it.
A brief, two-handed struggle with sword and mace—a sword stroke was parried, the swinging mace was not, and a splintered rib with shreds of flesh still sticking to it clung to the mace-pikes as an adversary fell, the left side of his body gone.
And the dead, still-quivering masses of flesh and bone were trampled as they fell, to be swiftly covered by other still-dying bodies which collapsed, writhing, atop them, to be trampled in their turn....
Doug shuddered uncontrollably. Kids, dying on a battlefield like this!
A pair of helmeted heads suddenly disappeared in a twin red gush from two pairs of sweating shoulders, and a group of twenty boys converged on the spot, fought for almost a minute, and then the heads were covered, and one boy at length dragged himself away, arms limp, helpless. He died while an evac ship was landing. The swinging mace that broke his back had not been necessary. He who wielded it fell also an instant later, his spine severed in a long, diagonal gash. And Doug thought how odd it was that a sword-cleft could look so like the tearing wound which a flying chunk of shrapnel would gouge.
He was so low now that he had long since lost sight of the lines' ends, had no way of knowing when encirclement at last would begin, when the center of each line would give way, when Final Phase would begin. But it seemed that the fighting had become less orderly, more closely-grouped, more frenzied. Within minutes the Third Phase map would be useless, and in Final Phase, there would be no knowing. No knowing until long after the end.
The altimeter needle said two hundred feet, when, if he had read the map with any degree of accuracy, he was over the area assigned to Tayne's Thirtieth Division. He had the ship straightened and descending when the blue light inset in the communications panel began to blink. He would let it blink. Yet if he answered, at least he would know their intentions....
Bloody young warriors sought desperately to give the great craft room as he descended. Some were incinerated in its back-blast, and Doug murmured a prayer that they had been among the already-dying. He would not let himself think that of all he had seen die, any two could have been Terry and Mike. He refused to let himself think that of the dozen turned to cinders by his descending jets, any two could have been Terry and Mike....
The blue-red ground came slowly up to meet him. The blue light kept blinking. He increased pressure on the bottom button—hovered, sank, hovered again, sank.
And when the ground was obliterated with the searing flame of his drive tubes, there was a gentle jar, and Doug let the button snap from beneath his finger. He was down, and there was not even time to feel relief.
He tripped over Tayne's body, fell heavily against the communications panel. His fingers fumbled for a switch near the inset microphone. The words blurred....FIELD ADDRESS. RADIO-SEND. RADIO-REC. FLEET INTERCOM.
He twisted the knob toRADIO-REC.and the blue light stopped blinking.
"... D to QT, D to QT, over...."
He turned the dial toRADIO-SEND.
"This is QT," he said. He switched back, waited.
"Larsen, this is Gundar! What in Napoleon's name are you doing? What did you do with Blair?"
Doug tore a plastisheet leaf from Tayne's note tablet, thrust it over the mike-face.
"I had to kill him."
"Killhim? Larsen you fool.... You know what they'll say—"
"He tried to get at the manual controls ... succeeded in wrecking the autorobot, so I had to use them. And I had to kill him when he tried to take over by force. Give you a—"
"Larsen, something wrong with your communications? You're coming in badly—didn't read your last. Say again please."
"He wrecked the robot-control," Doug repeated. His lips were dry across his teeth and it was hard to keep his voice even. "I had to break out the manual. He tried to take them over, too, so I had to kill him. He was like a maniac—you know how he hated me. Must have figured out the whole plan somehow, and went berserk. I'll file a complete report when this is finished. Over." He waited, sweat rolling in icy rivulets the length of his arms. The wound on his back stung, and his muscles were trembling with fatigue.
"What do you mean, when this is finished? Got to be immediate, man! There'll be hell to pay as it is. I was afraid something would go wrong—he was a smarter man than you thought, and I told you as much. Take care of whatever you're checking on down there immediately and then get back to headquarters and draw up a form 312-L-5. File for my office and the PG's. You should've done that at once. Out."
"Yes, sir, right away. Out."
There was a silent prayer on Doug's lips as he turned the knob toFIELD ADDRESS. It was worth a try....
There was a humming sound. However it functioned, it was ready.
"This is Senior Quadrate Blair. All units within range of this command will cease battle immediately...."
He twisted a control under the viewscreen, kept twisting until its scope had undergone a ninety degree shift. And then he saw them, waves of them, slowing, stopping, turning to face the ship. Unbelievably, the sound of his voice had somehow been carried for a radius of at least a mile, and thousands of them, their blood mingled with their muddied sweat, were suddenly still, listening. Some fell, untouched, as a last wound belatedly took its toll. But all that could remained standing. There could be no sitting rest, for none knew when the command to resume battle would come, and when it did, it would be death to be sitting.
Within a half minute, a great circle of them was still, battle continuing only at its periphery where his command was either being defended or had gone unheard.
"Attention, troops of Division Thirty, Second Regiment, First Battalion, A Company. If—" and he dared not hesitate, must say it quickly, and then wait, "—Ronal Blair and Kurt Blair are able, they will report to this ship on the double! Terry, Mike—" and there was a sudden catch in his voice that he could not help. Then, "Come running."
And he watched the viewscreen, turned the knob slowly to revolve its range, a complete 360 degrees.
Nothing, nothing as he turned slowly.
In moments Gundar Tayne would contact him again, question him, and he would have no convincing answer. And then it would be too late. He would have the choice of punching the top button and catapulting himself to safety, not knowing even if Mike and Terry still lived somewhere down there, or staying to carry out a gamble that should have been lost a dozen times already.
Suddenly, he saw it. The huge ship of the Director, in a long, circling glide. And the boys were moving again, raising their swords, circling their maces. He had been countermanded—
The blue light was blinking.
Another ten degrees of turn—
There was a terrible clattering at the stern of the ship as though it was being rent apart plate by plate. The screen would not depress that far. He revolved it back. Tayne's ship had landed a scant hundred yards away and a guard had already been flung around it. And men were approaching on the run, strange devices in their hands. Then they stopped, were putting the devices in position on the ground.