“They’re taking over the ship!”

With every ounce of will power in him, Holman concentrated on the generators and engines. That was the important part, the crucial system that spelled the difference between victory and defeat. The ship had to keep moving!

He looked at the instrument panels, but their soft luminosity faded away into darkness. And now it was becoming difficult to breathe. And the heating units seemed to be stopped. Holman could feel his life-warmth ebbing away through the inert metal hull of the dying ship.

But the engines were still throbbing. The ship was still streaking across space and time, heading toward a rendezvous with the infinite.

Surrender.

In a few moments you will be dead. Give up this mad flight and die peacefully.

The ship shuddered violently. What were they doing to it now?

Surrender!

“Go to hell,” Holman snapped. “While there’s breath in me, I’ll spend it fighting you.”

You cannot escape.

But now Holman could feel warmth seeping into the ship. He could sense the painful glare outside as billions of galaxies all rushed together down to a single cataclysmic point in space-time.

“It’s almost over!” he shouted. “Almost finished. And you’ve lost! Mankind is still alive, despite everything you’ve thrown at him. All of mankind—the good and the bad, the murderers and the music, wars and cities and everything we’ve ever done, the whole race from the beginning of time to the end—all locked up here in my skull. And I’m still here. Do you hear me? I’m still here!” The Others were silent.

Holman could feel a majestic rumble outside the ship, like distant thunder.

“The end of the world. The end of everything and everybody. We finish in a tie. Mankind has made it right down to the final second. And if there’s another universe after this one, maybe there’ll be a place in it for us all over again. How’s that for laughs?”

The world ended.

Not with a whimper, but a roar of triumph.

MONSTER SLAYER

While the Grand Tour novels are set on other worlds, for the most part, the driving force behind these stories comes from what is happening on Earth. Here is a tale of one fairly ordinary man, driven to extraordinary deeds—literally driven off the Earth, in order to help save the world.

This is the way the legend began.

He was called Harry Twelvetoes because, like all the men in his family, he was born with six toes on each foot. The white doctor who worked at the clinic on the reservation said the extra toes should be removed right away, so his parents allowed the whites to cut the toes off, even though his great-uncle Cloud Eagle pointed out that Harry’s father, and his father’s fathers as far back as anyone could remember, had gone through life perfectly well with twelve toes on their feet.

His secret tribal name, of course, was something that no white was ever told. Even in his wildest drunken sprees Harry never spoke it. The truth is, he was embarrassed by it. For the family had named him Monster Slayer, a heavy burden to lay across the shoulders of a little boy, or even the strong young man he grew up to be.

On the day that the white laws said he was old enough to take a job, his great-uncle Cloud Eagle told him to leave the reservation and seek his path in the world beyond.

“Why should I leave?” Harry asked his great-uncle.

Cloud Eagle closed his sad eyes for a moment, then said to Harry, “Look around you, nephew.”

Harry looked and saw the tribal lands as he had always seen them, brown desert dotted with mesquite and cactus, steep bluffs worn and furrowed as great-uncle’s face, turquoise blue sky and blazing Father Sun baking the land. Yet there was no denying that the land was changing. Off in the distance stood the green fields of the new farms and the tiny dark shapes of the square houses the whites were building. And there were gray rain clouds rising over the mountains.

Refugees were pouring into the high desert. The greenhouse warming that gutted the farms of the whites with drought also brought rains that were filling the dry arroyos of the tribal lands. The desert would be gone one day, the white scientists predicted, turned green and bountiful. So the whites were moving into the reservation.

“This land has been ours since the time of First Man and First Woman,” Great-uncle said. “But now the whites are swarming in. There is no stopping them. Soon there will be no place of our own left to us. Go. Find your way in the world beyond. It is your destiny.”

Reluctantly, Harry left the reservation and his family.

In the noisy, hurried world of the whites jobs were easy to find, but good jobs were not. With so many cities flooded by the greenhouse warming, they were frantically building new housing, whole new villages and towns. Harry got a job with a construction firm in Colorado, where the government was putting up huge tracts of developments for the hordes of refugees from the drowned coastal cities. He started as a lowly laborer, but soon enough worked himself up to a pretty handy worker, a jack-of-all-trades.

He drank most of his pay, although he always sent some of it back to his parents.

One cold, blustery morning, when Harry’s head was thundering so badly from a hangover that even the icy wind felt good to him, his supervisor called him over to her heated hut.

“You’re gonna kill yourself with this drinking, Harry,” said the supervisor, not unkindly.

Harry said nothing. He simply looked past the supervisor’s ear at the calendar tacked to the corkboard. The picture showed San Francisco the way it looked before the floods and the rioting.

“You listening to me?” the supervisor asked, more sharply. “This morning you nearly ran the backhoe into the excavation pit, for chrissake.”

“I stopped in plenty time,” Harry mumbled.

The supervisor just shook her head and told Harry to get back to work. Harry knew from the hard expression on the woman’s face that his days with this crew were numbered.

Sure enough, at the shape-up a few mornings later the super took Harry aside and said, “Harry, you Indians have a reputation for being good at high steel work.”

Harry’s head was thundering again. He drank as much as any two men, but he had enough pride to show up on the job no matter how bad he felt. Can’t slay monsters laying in bed, he would tell himself, forcing himself to his feet and out to work. Besides, no work, no money. And no money, no beer. No whiskey. No girls who danced on your lap or stripped off their clothes to the rhythm of synthesizer music.

Harry knew that it was the Mohawks back East who were once famous for their steelwork on skyscrapers, but he said nothing to the supervisor except, “That’s what I heard, too.”

“Must be in your blood, huh?” said the super, squinting at Harry from under her hard hat.

Harry nodded, even though it made his head feel as if some old medicine man was inside there thumping on a drum.

“I got a cousin who needs high steel workers,” the super told him. “Over in Greater Denver. He’s willing to train newbies. Interested?”

Harry shuffled his feet a little. It was really cold, this early in the morning.

“Well?” the super demanded. “You interested or not?”