omatic into his
pocket and straightened beside his inert would-be slayer.

A shimmering globe of blue mist appeared around them, brightened to a
dazzle, and dimmed again to a colored mist before it vanished, and when
it cleared away, he was standing beside the man in uniform, in the sandy
bed of a dry stream at the mouth of a little ravine, and directly in
front of him, looming above him, was a thing that had not been seen in
the world for close to half a century--a big, hot-smelling tank with a
red star on its turret.

He might have screamed--the din of its treads and engines deafened
him--and, in panic, he turned and ran, his old legs racing, his old
heart pumping madly. The noise of the tank increased as machine guns
joined the uproar. He felt the first bullet strike him, just above the
hips--no pain; just a tremendous impact. He might have felt the second
bullet, too, as the ground tilted and rushed up at his face. Then he was
diving into a tunnel of blackness that had no end....

* * * * *

Captain Fred Benson, of Benson's Butchers, had been jerked back into
consciousness when the field began to build around him. He was
struggling to rise, fumbling the grenade out of his pocket, when it
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. He had the bomb out of his pocket, when the machine guns began
firing again, this time at something on his left. Wondering what had
created the diversion, 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, 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 force, by a wave of almost solid heat. It
didn't smell like the heat of the tank's engines; it smelled like molten
metal, with undertones of burned flesh. Immediately, there was a
multiple explosion that threw him flat, as the tank's ammunition went
up. There were no screams.