Chapter IV: Part 4

Calmly but swiftly, Kimnar told the story, and he explained the issue that hung in the balance--Earth's alternate future against this already existing Galactic Civilization.

"Here and now," he concluded, "Fate can decide. Perhaps it is not in our own hands, after all."

Dr. Edwards stared at him aghast, the whole explanation of Henry's and Martia's precociousness striking him at last. Then he looked again at the approaching spheres.

"Do they know what we represent?" he asked.

"Yes," smiled Kimnar. "I communicated the message to them some time ago. I thought I was lying to them then, or doing some wishful thinking, merely to make them come for us--but now it's no longer a lie. You _can_ stop that moon bomb and strike a new alternate across a billion years of space and time! But if you do, I and my friends and a Galactic Civilization will cease to exist!"

* * * * *

All this time, the pilot, Kennedy, had been like a man coming out of anesthesia. He was a tall, gaunt young fellow with heavy, forward jutting brows and far seeing eyes. His long chin was way out as he watched everything and listened, with his wiry right hand lying inertly beside the simple bank of the ship's main controls.

"Kennedy!" yelled Weston. "What kind of guns are in those blisters?"

The pilot stared at him. "They fire one pound projectiles--nuclear bombs."

"_That_ is for me! Come on, Edwards! To your station!" Before anyone could stop him, he was swinging lightly away, from support to support, under the gravity free condition of free fall.

"Better strap in tight!" called Kennedy, coming to life at last. "If I'm going to maneuver out here, you're going to feel some Gs!"

"Let's go!" they heard Weston reply, from his blister. And Edwards was already on his way to the other position.

Grimly, the pilot shifted into emergency flight position and strapped himself in, while Kimnar and Henry and Martia watched him. They heard the Indian Prince stuttering through his prayers again.

"Kennedy," said Kimnar, half rising in his sling. "Don't do it!"

"You better stay strapped," replied the other. Even as he spoke, a great weight pressed upon them and the firmament outside began to revolve, sweeping Xlarn and the star ships momentarily out of sight.

"Kennedy!" persisted Kimnar, doggedly, in spite of the mounting pressure "Think this over! One world--Earth--cannot be worth twelve civilized solar systems! Let me contact those star men for you! You could continue to live--"

Everybody came close to blacking out as the rocket swept down over the row of globular ships and shook with recoil from Weston's and Edward's firing. A horrifying scene of exploding spheres swept by the observation panels, and Martia screamed in her mixed despair. Kimnar sweated profusely. Henry tensed his mind, preparing to paralyze Kennedy. It was an irresistible impulse, not quite tied to logic.

_No!_--came Kimnar's thought to him. _I have decided against that kind of coercion. There's something bigger out here than we. Call it Fate, if you will. And that power alone will have to decide! We can only propose!_

* * * * *

It was in that moment that Fate cut the cord. An eye-searing light filled the cabin, and Kennedy shrieked--"The reaction sphere!"

The planet once known as Earth burst into a minor nova, blasting its Great Ring into spiraling shreds and tatters of celestial tinsel. In the face of that swiftly advancing flame, the star ships that had survived the rocket's first onslaught flicked safely into hyper-space, and Kennedy _tried_ to stand enough Gs of acceleration to keep ahead of it. He barely made it.

But Weston and Edwards did not. At first they were blinded, utterly, by the blast, unprotected as they were in the blisters. Then, as a very small fraction of that searing wave licked out at the rocket, the hull resisted but the blisters fused and exploded. An airlock sealed the gun compartments off from the rocket's cabin, but the remains of the two gunners drifted into the turbulent ether.

There was one other decisive effect of the holocaust. Certain delicate apparatus connected with the collection and storing of Cosmic energy was also fused and made useless, before it had hardly begun to store up for the intended work ahead.

"That does it!" panted Kennedy. "We're licked!"

"No we're not," said Kimnar, nodding toward the observation panel. His tear-flooded eyes were struggling out of the momentarily induced blindness and he saw that the rocket had turned so that the glare of the explosion was not visible.

Instead, there was the towering, eternal firmament, and in it had suddenly materialized one of the star man spheres, glistening brightly in the light that their eyes were now being spared. Kennedy watched it helplessly as it approached.

Henry and Martia became aware of minds probing them gingerly and communing with Kimnar--minds of the star men, who had not struck back immediately because they had been hoping to rescue some of their own kind and take them home....

* * * * *

_While a bewildered but grateful man named Kennedy and a wide-eyed Indian Prince followed Kimnar, Henry and Martia into a scintillating civilization in far off space and time, a secret rocket experiment was being concluded in French Morocco. In the nose of the rocket was a D-C bomb, which was to be detonated on the surface of the moon._

_No one who had entered the Chronotron, at Weston's insistence, had succeeded in reaching the twentieth century and altering the future by a hair. But Pee Bee had shot far behind the line, landing somewhere in the 8th century B.C. No change in original Cause can ever fail to precipitate an equal degree of change in final Effect. Yet the world that existed between the 8th century B.C. and the twentieth century A.D. was not greatly shaken by having a few lines of print changed here and there in various histories, reference books and encyclopedias. It seemed that there never had been such a word as billiards. There was an ancient game known as pool (Egypt.--puul), the origin of which was not England, but in the glorious imperial days of Ethiopia, when Egypt was one of its provinces and a famous emperor referred to later by Roman historians as Pibeus, invented it to amuse his harem of two hundred wives...._