"You don't want to live forever, do you?"
"Wouldn't mind."
"Nuts. There must be something good about dying. Everybody does it."
"But only one; never again."
"Well, play it your way. I sort of wish I could be there to watch, too."
"Just tell mother I died game. So long, chief. I hear music in the air right now, and hell will pop directly."
Like twin, high-velocity jets of water, the two space flights came together, rebounded off of their individual barrier-layers and mingled in a jarring maze of whirling ships. In a shapeless pattern they whirled, and they might have whirled shapelessly all the way to Mojave, except for one item.
From Downing's lead ship there stabbed one of the heavy dymodine beams, its danger area marked with the characteristic heterodyne of light. It thrust a pale green finger into the sky before it, and as it came around, the other ships moved aside. That was the breaker. The flights reformed into twin interlocked spirals that thrust against one another with pressors and tore at one another with tractors in an effort to break up the other's flight.
Lane snapped: "That's a stinking trick."