"As I blinked in stunned disbelief a third shape swam into view--and a fourth. The eyes of the third shape were dull and opaque, like frosted glass, and the fourth shape was so atrophied that the scales on its breast seemed to overlap, squeezing out the flesh between them. "Then, abruptly, the first shape began to grow transparent. It shriveled and glistened, and I could see its skeleton gleaming beneath the glassy transparency of its dissolving flesh. "It vanished in a gush of gray light, so quickly that the air about it had a sucked-in look. Swiftly, terribly, the other shapes converged toward that swirling vacuum and were swallowed up, as though with their passing Time had collapsed in upon itself. "That Time _had_ collapsed I knew! For I am no fool. Long ago the alien inhabitant of another world had landed in that valley of all horror, and the living shuttlecock had split it up into time fragments, the better to destroy it. "It wanted me to know that--to realize that my time was short. So it had brought back a scene out of the past to unnerve me, and sap my will! "Could I go on taking it? I hadn't much time to think about it--for the web was filling with another picture. A living shuttlecock, the old one had called it. So now it was weaving another picture for me on Time's dissolving loom. "It was a picture so hideous I could hardly bring myself to believe in it. It was a picture of still another me. But if the old one had seemed palsied, wretched, at the end of his endurance--the face that stared out at me from the radiance was a thousandfold more so! "It was a face that had lost itself in Time--a face that was all sagging jowls and puckered brows, a toothless, yellowed caricature of a face. "But it was my face still--_my_ face ravaged by a century's decay! "Looking at myself as I would be--I suddenly had no longer any desire to live. A small, shrill voice shrieked within me that the monstrous, living shuttlecock desired just that--that it was resorting to a devilish subterfuge! "But I did not heed the voice. I just stood there, waiting to die, hoping that the end would come quickly. * * * * * "The blast was deafening! The sudden crash of it made a muffled booming in the thin air, and smashed against my eardrums like a trump of doom. The flare was blinding. The awful brightness of it lit up the cave like a hundred suns, and burned through my eyeballs into my brain. "When the smoke cleared all I could see at first was a shattered something lying on the floor of the cave, all twisted and bent back on itself like a smoking heap of shattered glass. "As I shook my big, dull head to clear it my boy-self lifted off his helmet and returned his blaster to the holster on his hip. His face was shining with triumph. The sweat was running off it and he was breathing heavily. "But he spoke to me and his words were good to hear. "'We got him, pal!'