Fredric Brown - Arena

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 113.93KB 19 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Arena

FREDRIC BROWN

This page formatted 2004 Blackmask Online.

http://www.blackmask.com

CARSON OPENED HIS EYES, and found himself looking upwards into a flickering blue dimness.

It was hot, and he was lying on sand, and a rock embedded in the sand was hurting his back. He rolled

over to his side, off the rock, and then pushed himself up to a sitting position.

'I'm crazy,' he thought. 'Crazy —or dead —or something.' The sand was blue, bright blue. And there

wasn't any such thing as bright blue sand on Earth or any of the planets. Blue sand under a blue dome

that wasn't the sky nor yet a room, but a circumscribed area —somehow he knew it was circumscribed

and finite even though he couldn't see to the top of it.

He picked up some of the sand in his hand and let it run through his fingers. It trickled down on to his

bare leg. Bare?

He was stark naked, and already his body was dripping perspiration from the enervating heat, coated

blue with sand wherever sand had touched it. Elsewhere his body was white.

He thought: then this sand is really blue. If it seemed blue only because of the blue light, then I'd be blue

also. But I'm white, so the sand is blue. Blue sand: there isn't any blue sand. There isn't any place like this

place I'm in.

Sweat was running down in his eyes. It was hot, hotter than hell. Only hell —the hell of the ancients

—was supposed to be red and not blue.

But if this place wasn't hell, what was it? Only Mercury, among the planets, had heat like this and this

wasn't Mercury. And Mercury was some four billion miles from ... From?

It came back to him then, where he'd been: in the little one-man scouter, outside the orbit of Pluto,

scouting a scant million miles to one side of the Earth Armada drawn up in battle array there to intercept

the Outsiders.

That sudden strident ringing of the alarm bell when the rival scouter —the Outsider ship —had come

within range of his detectors!

No one knew who the Outsiders were, what they looked like, or from what far galaxy they came, other

than that it was in the general direction of the Pleiades.

First, there had been sporadic raids on Earth colonies and outposts; isolated battles between Earth

patrols and small groups of Outsider spaceships; battles sometimes won and sometimes lost, but never

resulting in the capture of an alien vessel. Nor had any member of a raided colony ever survived to

describe the Outsiders who had left the ships, if indeed they had left them.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Not too serious a menace, at first, for the raids had not been numerous or destructive. And individually,

the ships had proved slightly inferior in armament to the best of Earth's fighters, although somewhat

superior in speed and man~uvrability. A sufficient edge in speed, in fact, to give the Outsiders their

choice of running or fighting, unless surrounded.

Nevertheless, Earth had prepared for serious trouble, building the mightiest armada of all time. It had

been waiting now, that armada, for a long time. Now the showdown was coming.

Scouts twenty billion miles out had detected the approach of a mighty fleet of the Outsiders. Those

scouts had never come back, but their radiotronic messages had. And now Earth's armada, all ten

thousand ships and half-million fighting spacemen, was out there, outside Pluto's orbit, waiting to intercept

and battle to the death.

And an even battle it was going to be, judging by the advance reports of the men of the far picket line

who had given their lives to report —before they had died —on the size and strength of the alien fleet.

Anybody's battle, with the mastery of the solar system hanging in the balance, on an even chance. A last

and only chance, for Earth and all her colonies lay at the utter mercy of the Outsiders if they ran that

gauntlet —Oh yes. Bob Carson remembered now. He remembered that strident bell and his leap for the

control panel. His frenzied fumbling as he strapped himself into the seat. The dot in the visiplate that grew

larger. The dryness of his mouth. The awful knowledge that this was it for him, at least, although the main

fleets were still out of range of one another.

This, his first taste of battle! Within three seconds or less he'd be victorious, or a charred cinder. One hit

completely took care of a lightly armed and armoured one-man craft like a scouter.

Frantically —as his lips shaped the word 'One' —he worked at the controls to keep that growing dot

centred on the crossed spiderwebs of the visiplate. His hands doing that, while his right foot hovered over

the pedal that would fire the bolt. The single bolt of concentrated hell that had to hit —or else. There

wouldn't be time for any second shot.

'Two.' He didn't know he'd said that, either. The dot in the visiplate wasn't a dot now. Only a few

thousand miles away, it showed up in the magnification of the plate as though it were only a few hundred

yards off. It was a fast little scouter, about the size of his.

An alien ship, all right!

'Thr —' His foot touched the bolt-release pedal.

And then the Outsider had swerved suddenly and was off the crosshairs. Carson punched keys

frantically, to follow.

For a tenth of a second, it was out of the visiplate entirely, and then as the nose of his scouter swung

after it, he saw it again, diving straight towards the ground.

The ground?

It was an optical illusion of some sort. It had to be: that planet —or whatever it was —that now covered

the visiplate couldn't be there. Couldn't possibly! There wasn't any planet nearer than Neptune three

billion miles away —with Pluto on the opposite side of the distant pinpoint sun.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Fredric Brown - Arena.pdf

共19页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Fredric Brown - Arena

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: