Grimes didn't argue, but pushed her out of the boat lock. He jumped after her, somersaulting slowly in the emptiness. He used his suit reaction unit to steady himself, and found himself facing the ship that he had just left. He saw an explosion at her bows, a billowing cloud of debris that expanded slowly broken gla.s.s, crystallizing atmosphere, a gradually separating ma.s.s of bodies, most of which ceased to struggle after a very few seconds.

But there were the larger bodies, seven of them, s.p.a.ce-suited and each of them sprouted a tail of incandescence as the Marines jetted back to their own ship. The Major used his laser pistol to break out through the control room ports but all the mutants would not be dead. There would be survivors, sealed off in their airtight compartments by the slamming of the emergency doors.

The survivors could be disposed of byCorsair's main armament.

XXIV.

"We were waiting for you, Skipper," Williams told Grimes cheerfully as the Commodore re-entered his own control room.

"Very decent of you, Commander," Grimes said, remembering how the Mate ofSundowner had realized his long standing ambition and clobbered his Captain. "Very decent of you."

He looked out of the viewports. The grain carrier was still close, at least as close as she had been when he had boarded her. The use of missiles would be dangerous to the vessel employing them and even later might touch off a mutually destructive explosion.

"You must still finish your task, man Grimes," Serressor reminded him.

"I know. I know." But there was no hurry. There was ample time to consider ways and means.

"All armament ready, sir."

"Thank you. To begin with, Commander Williams, we'll open the range . . ."

Then suddenly, the outline ofSundowner shimmered, shimmered and faded. She flickered out like a candle in a puff of wind. Grimes cursed. He should have foreseen this. The mutants had access to the Mannschenn Drive machinery.and how much, by continuous eavesdropping, had they learned? How much did they know?

"Start M.D.," he ordered. "Standard precession."

It took time but not too long a time. Bronson was already in the Mannschenn Drive room, and Bronson had been trained to the naval way of doing things rather than the relatively leisurely procedure of the merchant service. (Himself a merchant officer, a reservist, he had always made it his boast that he could beat the navy at its own game.) There was the brief period of temporal disorientation, the uncanny feeling that time was running backwards, the giddiness, the nausea. Outside the ports the Galactic Lens a.s.sumed the appearance of a distorted Klein flask, and the Lorn sun became a pulsing spiral of multi-colored light.

But there was no sign ofSundowner.

Grimes was speaking into the telephone. "Commander Bronson! Can you synchronize?"

"Withwhat?" Then "I'll try, sir. I'll try ..."

Grimes could visualize the engineer watching the flickering needles of his gauges, making adjustments measured in fractions of microseconds to his controls. Subtly the keening song of the spinning, precessing gyroscopes wavered and, as it did so, the outlines of the people and instruments in the control room lost their sharpness, while the colors of everything momentarily dulled and then became more vivid.

"There's the mucking b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" shouted Williams.

And there she was, close aboard them, a phantom ship adrift on a sea of impossible blackness, insubstantial, quivering on the very verge of invisibility.

"Fire at will!" ordered Grimes.

"But, sir," protested one of the officers. "If we interfere with the ship's ma.s.s while the Drive is in operation . . ."

"Fire at will!"repeated the Commodore.

"Ay, ay, sir!" acknowledged Carter happily.

But it was like shooting at a shadow. Missiles erupted from their launchers, laser beams stabbed out at the target and nothing happened. From the bulkhead speaker of the intercom Bronson snarled, "What the h.e.l.l are you playing at up there? How the h.e.l.l can I hold her in synchronization?"

"Sorry, Commander," said Grimes into his microphone. "Just lock on, and hold her. Just hold her, that's all I ask."

"An' what now, Skipper?" demanded Williams. "What now?"

"We shall use the Bomb," said Grimes quietly.

"We shall use the Bomb,"he said. He knew, as did all of his people, that the fusion device was their one hope of a return to their own s.p.a.ce and Time. ButSundowner must be destroyed, the Time Stream must, somehow, be diverted. Chemical explosives and destructive light beams were, in these circ.u.mstances, useless. There remained only the Sunday Punch.

The ships were close, so close that their temporal precession fields interacted. Even so, it was obvious why all the weapons so far employed had failed. Each and every discharge had meant an appreciable alteration ofCorsair's temporal precession rate, so that each and every missile and beam had missed in Time rather than in s.p.a.ce. HadCorsair been fitted with one of the latest model synchronizers her gunnery might have been more successful but she was not. Only Bronson's skill was keeping her in visual contact with her prey.

Getting the Bomb into position was not the same as loosing off a missile. Slowly, gently, the black-painted cylinder was eased out of its bay. The merest puff from one of its compressed air jets nudged it away fromCorsair towards the target. It fell gently through the s.p.a.ce between the two ships, came finally to rest againstSundowner's scarred hull.

At an order from Grimes the thick, lead shutters slid up over the control room ports. (But the thing was close, so close, too close. Even with the radar on minimum range the glowing blob that wa.s.sundowner almost filled the tank.) Carter looked at Grimes, waiting for the order. His face was pale and it was not the only pale face in Control. But Serressor that blasted lizard! was filling the confined s.p.a.ce with his irritating, high, toneless whistling.

Sonya came to sit beside him.

She said quietly, "You have to do it. We have to do it."

Even her presence could not dispel the loneliness of command. "No," he told her."I have to do it."

"Locking . . ." came Bronson's voice from the bulkhead speaker. "Locking ... Holding ..."

"Fire," said Grimes.

XXV.

Time had pa.s.sed.

How long, Grimes did not know, nor would he ever know. (Perhaps, he was often to suspect later, this was the next time around, or the time after that.) He half opened his eyes and looked at the red haired woman who was shaking him back to wakefulness the attractive woman with the faint scar still visible between her firm b.r.e.a.s.t.s. What was her name? He should know. He was married to her. Or had been married to her. It was suddenly of great importance that he should remember what she was called.

Susan . . . ?

Sarah . . . ?

No...

Sonya . .. ?

Yes, Sonya. That was it....

"John, wake up! Wake up! It's all over now. The Bomb blew us back into our own continuum, back to our own Time, even! We're in touch with Port Forlorn Naval Control, and the Admiral wants to talk to you personally."

"He can wait," said Grimes, feeling the fragments of his p.r.i.c.kly personality click back into place.

He opened his eyes properly, saw Williams sitting at his controls, saw Serressor, near by, still youthful, and with him the gangling adolescent who was Mayhew.

For a moment he envied them. They had regained their youth but at a dreadful risk to themselves. Even so, they had been lucky.

And so, he told himself, had been the human race not for the first time, and not for the last.

He thought,I hope I'm not around when our luck finally does run out.