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  “The toys will win,” said Heljanita. “By now, the battle will be over.”

  “The battle is over,” said Darkscar. “But the toys didn’t win. They lost. They are being slaughtered at this very moment.”

  “They were regrouping,” argued the toymaker. “Seven thousand ships can’t be stopped. Not even by war fleets out of time. And the ships from time can’t be there long. I’m going to destroy them. The toys cannot be defeated.”

  “The toys are finished,” reiterated Darkscar stubbornly. “Less than two minutes ago. I finished them myself.”

  Heljanita laughed. I didn’t know what was happening.

  The lever began to move.

  “Don’t pull that lever!” I commanded.

  The lever stopped.

  “It’s useless,” persisted Darkscar. “You’re beaten. There’s nothing to be gained.” I could tell from the edge in his voice that Darkscar still believed that we were going to be blown up. I wished that he hadn’t adopted his particular line of persuasion. If Heljanita was convinced that he had lost, might he not pull the lever simply to stop Darkscar winning?

  “Kill him,” said Darkscar.

  “It’s no use,” said Heljanita. “We can’t stand here forever. We can’t just go on talking. Chaos can’t make a decision. He’s never made any sort of a decision in his life. You’re powerless. I have to take what action there is to be taken. If you want to stop me, Lord Chaos, then you can. But I don’t think you will.”

  “You’ll kill us all!” said Darkscar.

  Heljanita shook his head. “I’m not going to kill you. Nor am I going to kill Chaos. I can absorb every bit of power this planet has—into that.”

  He pointed at the large, glass-sided machine with the massive power unit and densely packed control boards.

  “The time machine!” exclaimed Darkscar. “He’s going back in time to start the whole mess over again.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” said Heljanita. “I stay right here with you. The time machine stays in now. But it goes straight into the sun with all channels wide open.”

  Darkscar was dumbfounded.

  “You’re insane!” he shouted. “You’ll wreck the whole course of time. You’ll send the whole universe mad. You’ll destroy the entire galaxy!”

  “Don’t be a fool,” snarled the toymaker. “There isn’t that much power in a hundred suns. I’ll destroy nothing except the local coherency of time. I’ll send that fleet out of time back where it came from. I’ll undo all that it’s done. Without that fragment of eighty ships, the battle of Saraca will be over before the Confederacy’s reinforcements arrived. The course of time is already distorted: by you, by me, and by those ships that appeared in the Time Gap. A little more power can do nothing.”

  “If you throw that machine into the sun,” said Darkscar unsteadily, “it will pick up so much power before it dissolves that the sun will go nova and the whole nebula will distort. We’re in the Time Gap, Heljanita—a delicately balanced distortion of time and space. You’ll upset the balance and warp the time of the whole galaxy.”

  “One small burst of power,” replied Heljanita. I could see that he was talking to me not to Darkscar. I was the man who could stop him. I was the one whose decision he was forcing. “One small surge of temporal energy to push the third fleet back to where they came from, to put the battle of Saraca back in a state of flux.”

  “The battle of Saraca is over!” cried Darkscar.

  “In a few moments it won’t be.”

  “Stop him,” demanded Darkscar. “He’s mad. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when he pulls that lever. He could send all time mad!”

  “It’s the only way,” said Heljanita, and pulled the lever. It took a full two seconds to move over completely. During that time, I raised the gun, aimed it, and tried to fire.

  I suppose I made a decision by not firing. There comes a time when there really is no third course, when inaction is the same as action. But I .wish I could be sure that I did actually decide not to pull the trigger, and that it wasn’t just more hesitation.

  “Shoot him!” screamed Darkscar, and his face went paper white as he realized that I wasn’t going to. He moved like lightning. Before I had time to react, he was beside Diall’s inert body, picking up the rifle which still lay beside it.

  I swung round to face him, and Heljanita ran for the time machine. Darkscar didn’t waste any time shooting the toymaker, he ran for the lever. But it seemed to be too late already. The thrum of the power banks shot up from nearly nothing to a deafening intensity. The air seemed to vibrate, and I could feel the power being sucked out of the planet at an incredible rate.

  I don’t know how much load those cables could take, but there was enough flowing up them every minute to have cracked a planet in two. The time machine just stood there sucking it in and begging for more.

  Darkscar reached the lever and grabbed hold of it. Heljanita catapulted himself out of the machine and tackled the collector round the waist. Both men rolled and tumbled across the floor. The lever stayed down and the time machine continued to absorb the power flow. But no one was at the controls.

  The deafening heartbeat of the great machine resonated in my ribs, and the lights of the citadel were burning so brightly that I shielded my eyes. I could feel the floor beginning to shake. And still the power surged up from the center of the world while the two men wrestled on the floor.

  “Get him off!” Heljanita yelled to me. “The whole planet will go into the sun!”

  I ran forward, but what I was going to do, I still didn’t know.

  All of a sudden, Heljanita and Darkscar were separated again. Heljanita had gained the advantage because of Dark-scar’s burnt arm. The panic-stricken toymaker scrambled to his feet, his eyes seeming to bulge with fear as he tried desperately to get back into the machine and set the controls.

  Darkscar—there was nothing on his face except hate and rage—swung the rifle and snatched at the trigger.

  I shot him twice and watched his body hurled sideways like a paper doll in a high wind, leaving a jet stream of blood behind him, spilling out of his heart like a red fountain. The rifle shot went wild, and one of the power banks dissolved in a blinding white flash and a shower of sparks. But there was no explosion and no shock wave.

  “It’s too late!” screamed Heljanita, on his knees, his hands clawing at the glass door of the great machine. I pulled it open for him and kicked him to his feet, nearly falling over him as the floor began to bounce. Behind the droning of the time machine and the roaring of the banks, I could hear metal tearing and rock sliding as Heljanita’s citadel and its mountain base tried to shake themselves to pieces.

  Both of us tumbled into the time machine.

  “Get it off the planet! screamed in his ear, but he couldn’t hear me. I could feel icy sweat on his hands as I pressed them into the maze of controls. He was shivering as his pulpy fingers pressed switch after switch, fighting the tremendous burst of power with terror-stricken speed.

  The citadel was dissolving around us, vanishing into a darkness so absolute that I believed we were no longer in the universe. Light sprang into the tiny cockpit of the machine, and the sound began to die. Heljanita’s fear-filled face stared into mine, and we were both shouting.

  He was screaming something about us being trapped, about the time machine having started and not allowed us to get out. I was shouting about Darkscar, about how I’d had to kill him or the machine would have split the planet in two. I was trying to explain to the darkness that the last thing I’d wanted to do was kill him, but I’d had no other choice.

  As the deafening throb died away, so did our screaming.

  “We’re away,” he breathed, just above the soft murmur of the power units.

  “Is the planet safe?” I said, in a harsh, and unnecessarily loud voice.

  He nodded, the sweat disappearing from his face as he pulled himself together. “The power will have cut off as soon as I jettisoned
the cables and sent us up with the channels open. The planet’s all right.

  “But you and I are going into the sun.”

  SHADOW OF A DOUBT

  Judson Deathdancer moved. The effort shocked his brain and brought tears to his eyes, but it convinced him that he was still alive.

  He lay on a slim metal catwalk which girdled the central column of the Falcor, the artificial gravity holding him tightly against the perforated metal plates. He was lucky, in a way. He could have fallen a great deal further.

  He opened his eyes, blinked away the tears, and looked around. There was nothing to be seen that was in the least out of the ordinary. On one side was the shiny metal of the omega-drive power column. On the other was a narrow gap extending down into the bowels of the ship, filled with cables which connected screens and microphones and motors. Across the gap, just out of touching distance was the bulging bulk of a gun pod. A thick projection from the catwalk gave access to the door of the tiny Cham-* ber.

  Deathdancer rolled over to face the central column, and looked at himself in the mirror smooth metal. Half of his face was burned away. One ear was gone, much of his cheek and the side of his jaw. He would never speak or eat again. His neck was scarred and blistered, the shoulder stripped of flesh to expose the blackened clavicle. His beard had burned away, leaving his lips puffed and serum-filled and his nose red and peeling. But both eyes lived on in the ruins of that countenance.

  One arm was broken at least six times, all three long bones being shattered. It was impossible to tease the slightest movement from the limb, and it was leaking arterial blood at an alarming rate.

  The other arm was difficult to move because of the burn damage to the shoulder which supported it. But his legs were still whole, and if he was not too weak, they would support him.

  Somehow, he got to his feet.

  He leaned on the column, feeling the soft hum through the metal skin, and paused to gather what little strength he had left. Then he took a step out toward the extension of the catwalk which would carry him to the door of the gun pod. He swayed dangerously. The protective rail on the catwalk was very low, and Deathdancer was a big man. He could not reach out to steady himself with his hand. But he did not fall. His mind reeled and the ship seemed to spin around him, but he stayed erect. He took another step out on to the narrow path which led to the pod.

  He half fell against the door, expecting it to yield to his push. But it did not. He stood away from it, assembling his strength and his balance. Then, in a single movement, he lifted his foot, exploded a savage kick, and planted his sole back on the catwalk before he fell over. The door flew off its hinges, and the reaction to the kick swayed him backward.

  As he swung forward again, he saw the toy which had been seated at the gun disentangling itself from the door. The robot was having difficulty because there was so little room inside the pod. The microphone of the communicator and the trigger mechanism of the gun both stuck deep into the guts of the low slung chair.

  The toy dragged a gun from a holster by its side. It was a handgun, but it was an omega-energy weapon and not a conventional piston.

  Before the toy had had time to aim—toys never fired without aiming—Deathdancer hit it with the forward lurch of his massive body. Door, toy and Beast went down together, with the door in between preventing the toy from getting any kind of grip on the Falcorian. Blood splashed all over the walls of the pod and spilled over the edge of the door to stain the silver skin of the toy.

  Pain slammed Deathdancer’s mind into a kaleidoscope of sensation, and for a moment he was incapable of voluntary action.

  The toy had not let go of the gun. It got the weapon round the obstruction and pressed it deep into Death-dancer’s abdomen. It fired. The beam went clean through the Beast lord’s body and exited between the kidney and the spine, neatly cauterizing the wound as it went.

  The robot did not consider it necessary to fire again. The man must now be dead. It stood up, lifting both the door and the apparently inert body which lay atop it without too much difficulty. There was not room in the pod to roll the burden away, and it got stuck in the doorway. The toy hesitated. Carefully, it laid the gun down on the floor and reached round to maneuver its burden out into the gap running down the center of the ship. Deathdancer, who could never have stood up again on his own, found himself not only alive but erect and conscious, supported by the door. As the toy edged its slim body round to facilitate its task, Deathdancer hit the robot with his knee. The blow was as strong as he could make it, and his kneecap shattered with a liquid crunch. The toy was unbroken, but it fell backward heavily. The door and Deathdancer descended upon it again. The handle on the inside of the door went clean through one of the toy’s red plastic eyes and made a disastrous mess of its delicate wire-and-plastic brain. It was quite dead.

  There was a moment when Deathdancer had no idea at all what had happened. Slowly, the elements of the new situation became obvious. The toy was dead. The gun was on the floor. He had a little time all to himself.

  He picked up the gun. Slowly, his knees bent and his chest rose away from the smooth plastic surface of the door. It was not only slow, but intensely painful. But the wounded knee did not give way. There was a long-lasting, sickening sensation, when he thought that he could never make it. But he stood and turned.

  Then he deliberately fell full length along the catwalk and pulled himself back out toward the central column. His hand crept out, and he fired at the power column. He raised himself painfully into a half-kneeling position, so that he could see what he was doing.

  At a range of three inches, the power gun was burning a path through the bright skin of the power column.

  A door opened way above his head. It was the door to the control room—the door from which he had fallen. The absence of the toy had been noticed. A tall silver figure appeared on the platform outside the control room, holding a gun in its hand. It was a small pistol, exactly like the one Deathdancer held.

  Deathdancer did not shoot at the toy. He continued to blaze away at the same spot on the body of the column, the power banks which fed the omega-drive. He kept the trigger depressed, maintaining a continuous beam.

  The toy above analyzed the situation, deciding whether it would be better to shoot the gun from Deathdancer’s hand or kill the man. The analysis filled the vital fraction of a second which Deathdancer required.

  The toy shot a deadly accurate beam at the hand which held the gun. The flesh melted and burned. But the range was too great. The gun was too small. A rifle would have evaporated the hand instantaneously, and even a normal pistol would have kicked the hand away from its steady aim. But the omega-pistol did neither. For a long second, Deathdancer’s roasting bones kept the trigger depressed and the stream of energy flooding through the hole he had burned.

  Just before his hand fell off at the wrist, energy began to flow out as well as in.

  The toy shot Deathdancer in the head, and his eyes flared briefly like incandescent jewels in a mass of flaking ash. But it was too late. He had already seen what he had stayed alive to see.

  A shower of brilliant sparks erupting from the tired power banks became a cataract of blinding whiteness.

  The robot pilot moved in for the kill, his gunners already firing to annihilate the Aurita.

  The fatal beams cut out, a fraction of a second too soon.

  The Falcor blew up.

  DYING ON DESPAIR

  The sporadic white flares of the omega-rifles seemed to be the only illumination of the battle of Despair. The radiance of the sullen sun was put to shame by the brilliance of the rifle fire.

  It was a silent battle. If the ghosts had voices, they chose not to use them. The pathetic babble of the frog people was stilled. They already knew what they were doing and how to do it. The toys also had no need to speak. They knew exactly what to do by virtue of being what they were.

  There was no pall of smoke to cloak the combatants and mask the face of the battle.
The weak, listless vegetation would not bum. When rifle fire splashed the pale reeds and the delicate flowers, they simply disintegrated into white ash and descended to become a part of the cloying mud. Nothing drifted upward into the atmosphere. It was all held tightly by the body of Planet Despair.

  The ghosts were the real fighters. They were not as fast, nor were they as accurate with their fire. But they were desperate. It mattered to them whether they killed before being killed. To them, preservation of their lives was not merely a logically desirable situation, it was the end. The toys were not warriors at all, even in this personal, hand-to-hand contest. They were the cells of a great, many bodied machine, with purpose but no ambition. Yet they were better. They were winners and the ghosts were the losers. That was obvious before the first shot was fired.

  The frog people were not fighters, either. They were cattle running to the slaughter. It was not that they did not want to fight, simply that they could not fight. They had no hands. They scrambled through the mud and swarmed at the toys. They hit the robots with their bodies, punched them with their pathetic, webbed paws. And they were slaughtered with callous ease. If only Darkscar’s vanity had permitted him to make the frog people his equals instead of leaving them deliberately crippled, then the battle would have been even. Wherever a toy fell, wherever a ghost died, there would have been a frog to pick up his rifle and join the fight with a will to win and the means to kill. But the gliding shadows were only shadows. They were intelligent, determined, and living. They were defending their home against the silver horde. But the allies of the ghosts were even less than the faded, half-real ghosts themselves.

  The ghosts and the frog people tried hard. They attacked with all the savagery and desperate need to kill that only men are capable of. It was like the battle in the House of Stars: the last stand, when the blood fever broke the walls of reason. The frog people hampered and harried the toys, tried to stop them firing, tumbled them into the mud in futile attempts to drown them. The toys did not drown, their metal bodies sustained no hurt from blows, and they came steadfastly forward.