by Flyboy707
“What name?” he asked. I wrote it out. He raised his eyebrows. “Like so, eh? Hmm—“
“You just do your job, Sergeant.” I turned to my companion.
“Son, your troubles are over. You‘re about to start the best job a man ever held—and you‘ll do well. I know.”
“That you will!” agreed the sergeant.
“Look at me—born in 1917—still around, still young, still enjoying life.”
I went back to the jump room, set everything on preselected zero.
2301–V–7 Nov. 1970–NYC—―Pop’s Place
I came out of the storeroom carrying a fifth of Drambuie to account for the minute I had been gone. My assistant was arguing with the customer who had been playing I‘m My Own Grandpaw! I said, “Oh, let him play it, then unplug it.” I was very tired. It‘s rough, but somebody must do it, and it‘s very hard to recruit anyone in the later years, since the Mistake of 1972. Can you think of a better source than to pick people all fouled up where they are and give them well–paid, interesting (even though dangerous) work in a necessary cause? Everybody knows now why the Fizzle War of 1963 fizzled. The bomb with New York‘s number on it didn‘t go off, a hundred other things didn‘t go as planned—all arranged by the likes of me.
But not the Mistake of ‘72; that one is not our fault—and can‘t be undone; there‘s no paradox to resolve. A thing either is, or it isn‘t, now and forever amen. But there won‘t be another like it; an order dated 1992 takes precedence any year.
I closed five minutes early, leaving a letter in the cash register telling my day manager that I was accepting his offer to buy me out, to see my lawyer as I was leaving on a long vacation. The Bureau might or might not pick up his payments, but they want things left tidy. I went to the room in the back of the storeroom and forward to 1993.
2200–VII–12 Jan 1993–Sub Rockies Annex–HQ Temporal DOL
I checked in with the duty officer and went to my quarters, intending to sleep for a week. I had fetched the bottle we bet (after all, I won it) and took a drink before I wrote my report. It tasted foul, and I wondered why I had ever liked Old Underwear. But it was better than nothing; I don‘t like to be cold sober, I think too much. But I don‘t really hit the bottle either; other people have snakes—I have people.
I dictated my report; forty recruitments all okayed by the Psych Bureau—counting my own, which I knew would be okayed. I was here, wasn‘t I? Then I taped a request for assignment to operations; I was sick of recruiting. I dropped both in the slot and headed for bed. My eye fell on The By–Laws of Time over my bed:
Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow.
If at Last You Do Succeed, Never Try Again.
A Stitch in Time Saves Nine Billion.
A Paradox May Be Paradoctored.
It Is Earlier When You Think.
Ancestors Are Just People.
Even Jove Nods.
They didn‘t inspire me the way they had when I was a recruit; thirty subjective–years of time–jumping wears you down. I undressed, and when I got down to the hide I looked at my belly. A Cesarean leaves a big scar, but I‘m so hairy now that I don‘t notice it unless I look for it.
Then I glanced at the ring on my finger.
The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever. I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?
I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away.
So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light.
You aren‘t really there at all. There isn‘t anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark. I miss you dreadfully!
ARENA
FREDRIC BROWN
INTRODUCTION
First published in the June 1944 edition of Astounding Science Fiction, Brown’s story was instantly hailed as a classic and has been reprinted numerous times. In 1970 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted it one of the 26 greatest science fiction short stories of all time.
One of his most famous short stories, "Arena", was used as the basis for the episode of the same name in the original series of Star Trek, written by producer Gene Coon.
Gene Coon’s teleplay bears little resemblance to the story other than the basic premise of a human and alien forced into combat in an "arena," with the destruction of the loser’s race as the stakes. In their “behind the scenes” book, Inside Star Trek, Herbert F. Solow (former executive in charge of production for Desilu Studios) and Robert H. Justman (Co-producer of Star Trek) avow that Coon wrote the script in one weekend and only became aware of its similarities to Brown’s story when it was pointed out by a member of the studio's research team.
It was also the basis of a 1964 episode entitled "Fun and Games" of The Outer Limits, probably the Space: 1999 episode "The Rules of Luton", and possibly the Blake's 7 episode "Duel".
Arena
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.
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 maneuverability. 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 armored one-man craft like a scouter.
Frantically -- as his lips shaped the word 'One' -- he worked at the controls to keep that growing dot centered 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, and still didn't.
It couldn't be there, that whatever-it-was he was diving into, only a few hundred miles below him.
In his sudden anxiety to keep from crashing, he forgot the Outsider ship. He fired the front breaking rockets, and even as the sudden change of speed slammed him forward against the seat straps, fired full right for an emergency turn. Pushed them down and held them down, knowing that he needed everything the ship had to keep from crashing and that a turn that sudden would black him out for a moment.
It did black him out.
And that was all. Now he was sitting in hot blue sand, stark naked but otherwise unhurt. No sign of his spaceship and -- for that matter -- no sign of space. That curve overhead wasn't a sky, whatever else it was.
He scrambled to his feet.
Gravity seemed a little more than Earth-normal. Not much more.
Flat sand stretching away, a few scrawny bushes in clumps here and there. The bushes were blue, too, but in varying shades, some lighter than the blue of the sand, some darker.
Out from under the nearest bush ran a little thing that was like a lizard, except that it had more than four legs. It was blue, too. Bright blue. It saw him and ran back again under the bush.
He looked up again, trying to decide what was overhead. It wasn't exactly a roof, but it was dome-shaped. It flickered and was hard to look at. But definitely, it curved down to the ground, to the blue sand, all around him.
He wasn't far from being under the center of the dome. At a guess, it was a hundred yards to the nearest wall, if it was a wall. It was as though a blue hemisphere of something about two hundred and fifty yards in circumference was inverted over the flat expanse of the sand.
And everything blue, except one object. Over near a far curving wall there was a red object. Roughly spherical, it seemed to be about a yard in diameter. Too far for him to see clearly through the flickering blueness.
But, unaccountably, he shuddered.
He wiped sweat from his forehead, or tried to, with the back of his hand.
Was this a dream, a nightmare? This heat, this sand, that vague feeling of horror he felt when he looked towards that red thing?
A dream? No, one didn't go to sleep and dream in the midst of a battle in space.
Death? No, never. If there were immortality, it wouldn't be a senseless thing like this, a thing of blue heat and blue sand and a red horror.
Then he heard the voice.
Inside his head he heard it, not with his ears. It came from nowhere or everywhere.
'Through spaces and dimensions wandering,' rang the words in his mind, 'and in this space and this time, I find two peoples about to exterminate one and so weaken the other that it would retrogress and never fulfill its destiny, but decay and return to mindless dust whence it came. And I say this must not happen.'
'Who ... what are you?' Carson didn't say it aloud, but the question formed itself in his brain.
'You would not understand completely. I am –‘ 'There was a pause as though the voice sought -- in Carson's brain -- for a word that wasn't there, a word he didn't know. 'I am the end of evolution of a race so old the time cannot be expressed in words that have meaning to your mind. A race fused into a single entity, eternal.
'An entity such as your primitive race might become' -- again the groping for a word -- 'time from now. So might the race you call, in your mind, the Outsiders. So I intervene in the battle to come, the battle between fleets so evenly matched that destruction of both races will result. One must survive. One must progress and evolve.'
'One?' thought Carson. 'Mine or…’
'It is in my power to stop the war, to send the Outsiders back to their galaxy. But they would return, or your race would sooner or later follow them there. Only by remaining in this space and time to intervene constantly could I prevent them from destroying one another, and I cannot remain.
'So I shall intervene now. I shall destroy one fleet completely without loss to the other. One civilization shall thus survive.'
Nightmare. This had to be nightmare, Carson thought. But he knew it wasn't.
It was too mad, too impossible, to be anything but real.
He didn't dare ask the question -- which? But his thoughts asked it for him.
'The stronger shall survive,' said the voice. 'That I cannot -- and would not -- change. I merely intervene to make it a complete victory, not' -- groping again -- 'not Pyrrhic victory to a broken race.
'From the outskirts of the not-yet battle I plucked two individuals, you and an Outsider. I see from your mind that, in your early history of nationalisms, battles between champions to decide issues between races were not unknown.
'You and your opponent are here pitted against one another, naked and unarmed, under conditions equally unfamiliar to you both, equally unpleasant to you both. There is no time limit, for here there is no time. The survivor is the champion of his race. That race survives.'
'But -- ' Carson's protest was too inarticulate for expression, but the voice answered it.
'It is fair. The conditions are such that the accident of physical strength will not completely decide the issue. There is a barrier. You will understand. Brain-power and courage will be more important than strength. Most especially courage, which is the will to survive.'
'But while this goes on, the fleets will -- '
'No, you are in another space, another time. For as long as you are here, time stands still in the universe you know. I see you wonder whether this place is real. It is, and it is not. As I -- to your limited understanding -- am and am not real. My existence is mental and
not physical. You saw me as a planet; it could have been as a dust-mote or a sun.
'But to you this place is now real. What you suffer here will be real. And if you die here, your death will be real. If you die, your failure will be the end of your race. That is enough for you to know.'
And then the voice was gone.
Again he was alone, but not alone. For as Carson looked up, he saw that the red thing, the sphere of horror that he now knew was the Outsider, was rolling towards him.
Rolling.
It seemed to have no legs or arms that he could see, no features. It rolled across the sand with the fluid quickness of a drop of mercury. And before it, in some manner he could not understand, came a wave of nauseating hatred.
Carson looked about him frantically. A stone, lying in the sand a few feet away, was the nearest thing to a weapon. It wasn't large, but it had sharp edges, like a slab of flint. It looked a bit like blue flint.
He picked it up, and crouched to receive the attack. It was coming fast, faster than he could run.
No time to think out how he was going to fight it; how anyway could he plan to battle a creature whose strength, whose characteristics, whose method of fighting he did not know? Rolling so fast, it looked more than ever like a perfect sphere.
Ten yards away. Five. And then it stopped.
Rather, it was stopped. Abruptly the near side of it flattened as though it had run up against an invisible wall. It bounced, actually bounced back.
Then it rolled forward again, but more cautiously. It stopped again, at the same place. it tried again, a few yards to one side.
