STALEMATE
BY BASIL WELLS
Illustrated by Leo Summers
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of ScienceFiction November 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidencethat the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The bullet slapped rotted leaves and dirt into Gram Treb's eyes. Hewormed backward to the bole of a small tree.
"Missed!" he shouted. He used English, the second tongue of them both."Throw away your carbine and use rocks."
"You tasted it anyhow," Harl Neilson's shrill young voice cried. "Howwas the sample?"
"That leaves you two cartridges," taunted Treb. "Or is it only one?"
The sixth sense that had brought him safely through two of these bloodywar duels here in space made him fling his body to the left. He rolledover once and lay huddled in a shallow depression. He knew all the tinyhollows and ridges—they were his insurance on this mile-wide islandhigh above Earth.
Something thudded into the tree roots behind him. He hugged the ground,body flattened. His breath eased raggedly outward, and caught. Thewaiting—the seconds that became hours! If the grenade rolled after him,down the slope into his shelter, he was finished.
There was nothing he could do. His palms oozed sweat....
The grenade exploded. It was like a fist slammed against his skull. Hewas numbed for a long instant. Then he checked.
Unharmed. The depression had saved his neck this time. He wanted toshout at Neilson, tell him he was down to a lone grenade, but that waspoor strategy. Now he must withdraw, make Neilson think him injured ordead, and trap him in turn.
They were the last of the belligerents here within Earth Satellite. Fortwo months, since what would be May on Earth, they had carried on thismad duel. Of the other eighteen who had started the war in November ofthe preceding year, only four had survived their wounds. The UnitedNations' supervisory seconds had transported them to their homes inAndilia and in Baryt....
Treb wormed his way as noiselessly as possible into the undergrowth,sprawling at last in the shelter of an earthen mound thirty feet fromthe grenade's raw splash. He waited—and thought.
Memories can be unpleasant. He could see his comrades of the threebattles as they had fallen, wounded or gray with death. Too many of themhad he helped bury. He remembered the treasured photos.
The draining wound in his right forearm throbbed....
The enemy dead too. He had killed several of them—more than his share,he thought savagely. They too were young despite the ragged beards someof them cultivated.
Treb felt like an old man. And he was old. He was twenty-nine. He hada son also named Gram, a boy of five, and little Alse, who was two. Hadlittle Alse's mother lived he would never have volunteered for thisthird United Nations' war duel.
He would have been with her in the mountain valley of Krekar workinghard, and gradually erasing those other ugly episodes here on EarthSatellite One....
Minutes crawled by, lumped together into hours. Birds sang in the treesso laboriously maintained here in the satellite's disk-shaped heart.And, a hundred feet overhead, where the