Hunter Patrol | Page 7

the button, swallow it." Gregory gave him a
small blue pill.
"Well, I guess that's all there is," Gregory continued. "I hope...." His
face twitched, and he dropped to the floor with a thud. Carl and Walter
came forward, dragged him away from the machine.
"Conditioning got him. Getting me, too," Walter said. "Hurry up, man!"
Benson swallowed the pill, pressed the button and stepped back into the
red circle, drawing his pistol and snapping off the safety. The blue mist
closed in on him.
* * * * *

This time, however, it did not thicken into blackness. It became
luminous, brightening to a dazzle and dimming again to a colored mist,
and then it cleared, while Benson stood at raise pistol, as though on a
target range. He was facing a big desk at twenty feet, across a
thick-piled blue rug. There was a man seated at the desk, a white-haired
man with a mustache and a small beard, who wore a loose coat of some
glossy plum-brown fabric, and a vividly blue neck-scarf.
The pistol centered on the v-shaped blue under his chin. Deliberately,
Benson squeezed, recovered from the recoil, aimed, fired, recovered,
aimed, fired. Five seconds gone. The old man slumped across the desk,
his arms extended. Better make a good job of it, six, seven, eight
seconds; he stepped forward to the edge of the desk, call that fifteen
seconds, and put the muzzle to the top of the man's head, firing again
and snapping on the safety. There had been something familiar about
The Guide's face, but it was too late to check on that, now. There wasn't
any face left; not even much head.
A box, on the desk, caught Benson's eye, a cardboard box with an
envelope, stamped Top Secret! For the Guide Only! taped to it. He
holstered his pistol and caught that up, stuffing it into his pocket, in
obedience to an instinct to grab anything that looked like intelligence
matter while in the enemy's country. Then he stepped back to the spot
where the field had deposited him. He had ten seconds to spare;
somebody was banging on a door when the blue mist began to gather
around him.
* * * * *
He was crouching, the spherical plastic object in his right hand, his
thumb over the button, when the field collapsed. Sure enough, right in
front of him, so close that he could smell the very heat of it, was the big
tank with the red star on its turret. He cursed the sextet of
sanctimonious double-crossers eight thousand miles and fifty years
away in space-time. The machine guns had stopped--probably because
they couldn't be depressed far enough to aim at him, now; that was a
notorious fault of some of the newer Pan-Soviet tanks--and he rocked
back on his heels, pressed the button, and heaved, closing his eyes. As

the thing left his fingers, he knew that he had thrown too hard. His
muscles, accustomed to the heavier cast-iron grenades of his experience,
had betrayed him. For a moment, he was closer to despair than at any
other time in the whole phantasmagoric adventure. Then he was hit,
with physical violence, by a wave of almost solid heat. It didn't smell
like the heat of the tank's engines; it smelled like molten metal, with
undertones of burned flesh. Immediately, there was a multiple
explosion that threw him flat, as the tank's ammunition went up. There
were no screams. It was too fast for that. He opened his eyes.
The turret and top armor of the tank had vanished. The two massive
treads had been toppled over, one to either side. The body had
collapsed between them, and it was running sticky trickles of molten
metal. He blinked, rubbed his eyes on the back of his hand, and looked
again. Of all the many blasted and burned-out tanks, Soviet and UN,
that he had seen, this was the most completely wrecked thing in his
experience. And he'd done that with one grenade....
* * * * *
At that moment, there was a sudden rushing overhead, and an instant
later the barrage began falling beyond the crest of the ridge. He looked
at his watch, blinked, and looked again. That barrage was due at 0550;
according to the watch, it was 0726. He was sure that, ten minutes ago,
when he had looked at it, up there at the head of the ravine, it had been
twenty minutes to six. He puzzled about that for a moment, and decided
that he must have caught the stem on something and pulled it out, and
then twisted it a little, setting the watch ahead. Then, somehow, the
stem had gotten pushed back in, starting it at the new setting. That