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he 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.
His detectors! They hadn't shown any object of planetary dimensions, even of asteroid dimensions,