And the hurtling craft swung again on her blazing tail. Doug let the panel return to zero and held the bottom button in. The belly-jets had automatically cut out, and again he hovered, sinking slightly, this time not above the dark blue waste of the Venusian sea, but above the place where fantastic young armies with ten-year-old soldiers were writhing, dying. The altimeter needle showed five thousand feet, and already he was able to discern the battle-lines of the two quadrants, no longer in close marching formation, but now spread wide to cover an irregular area of more than one hundred square miles. The lines surged first forward then back, as though joined in some Gargantuan tug-of-war--shifted, changed, like a great wounded serpent in its death-throes. The lines were little more than a hundred yards in depth because deployment for the games provided for no rear echelons--there were only the battle echelons, with their ends defended mightily against encirclement, attack from the rear. Eventually, Doug knew, the flank defenses of both lines would give way, and the centers of each would rupture, and then, until the hovering tab and evac planes gave the signal that the Phase Three limit had been reached, the battle would wage in a great undulating mass, without formation, without plan, without reason. He had to reach Mike and Terry before then, for once the lines disintegrated into Final Phase--deployment at will--they'd be lost to him for good. And Phase Three lasted at best for three hours. Final Phase, when it begun, would last as many days. Somehow, he had to jockey the hovering ship over the area where the map-estimate indicated that Mike and Terry would be fighting. And when he landed, he must somehow halt the carnage momentarily--just long enough for them to see him, to run.... Doug tilted the great ship at an angle of about seventy degrees, compensated it on the main drive and the single bank of bow belly-jets that automatically checked in as the ship left vertical balance. And the terrain below him moved slowly, canted oddly between horizon and sky. Slowly, toward the area designated on the map--slowly, sinking slightly, so that he could see their faces now, watch as their maces shattered the glittering helmets into junk, smashed into living flesh, as their broadswords glistened red and swung, struck.... * * * * * Momentarily hypnotized by the horror that screamed below him and by the sickening realization that what he saw was real even though his reason rebelled through force of habit from admission that such reality could exist, Doug watched the tilted battlefield as it stretched but hundreds of feet below him now, watched as a smoothly-oiled, carefully calculated device preserved the peace of a planet. _A small, sweating body was hewn in two._ _A helmeted head fell; an arm dropped grotesquely beside it._