htening to a dazzle and dimming again to a colored mist,
and then it cleared, while Benson stood at raise pistol, as though on a
target range. He was facing a big desk at twenty feet, across a
thick-piled blue rug. There was a man seated at the desk, a white-haired
man with a mustache and a small beard, who wore a loose coat of some
glossy plum-brown fabric, and a vividly blue neck-scarf.

The pistol centered on the v-shaped blue under his chin. Deliberately,
Benson squeezed, recovered from the recoil, aimed, fired, recovered,
aimed, fired. Five seconds gone. The old man slumped across the desk,
his arms extended. Better make a good job of it, six, seven, eight
seconds; he stepped forward to the edge of the desk, call that fifteen
seconds, and put the muzzle to the top of the man's head, firing again
and snapping on the safety. There had been something familiar about The
Guide's face, but it was too late to check on that, now. There wasn't
any face left; not even much head.

A box, on the desk, caught Benson's eye, a cardboard box with an
envelope, stamped _Top Secret! For the Guide Only!_ taped to it. He
holstered his pistol and caught that up, stuffing it into his pocket, in
obedience to an instinct to grab anything that looked like intelligence
matter while in the enemy's country. Then he stepped back to the spot
where the field had deposited him. He had ten seconds to spare; somebody
was banging on a door when the blue mist began to gather around him.

* * * * *

He was crouching, the spherical plastic object in his right hand, his
thumb over the button, when the field collapsed. Sure enough, right in
front of him, so close that he could smell the very heat of it, was the
big tank with the red star on its turret. He cursed the sextet of
sanctimonious double-crossers eight thousand miles and fifty years away
in space-time. The machine guns had stopped--probably because they
couldn't be depressed far enough to aim at him, now; that was a
notorious fault of some of the newer Pan-Soviet tanks--and he rocked
back on his heels, pressed the button, and heaved, closing his eyes. As
the thing left his fingers, he knew that he had thrown too hard. His
muscles, accustomed to the heavier cast-iron grenades of his experience,
had betrayed him. For a moment, he was closer to despair than at any
other time in the whole phantasmagoric adventure. Then he was hit, with
physical violence, by a wave of