He was crouching, the spherical plastic object in his right hand, his
thumb over the button, when the field collapsed. Sure enough, right in
front of him, so close that he could smell the very heat of it, was the
big tank with the red star on its turret. He cursed the sextet of
sanctimonious double-crossers eight thousand miles and fifty years away
in space-time. The machine guns had stopped--probably because they
couldn't be depressed far enough to aim at him, now; that was a
notorious fault of some of the newer Pan-Soviet tanks--and he rocked
back on his heels, pressed the button, and heaved, closing his eyes. As
the thing left his fingers, he knew that he had thrown too hard. His
muscles, accustomed to the heavier cast-iron grenades of his experience,
had betrayed him. For a moment, he was closer to despair than at any
other time in the whole phantasmagoric adventure. Then he was hit, with
physical violence, by a wave of almost solid heat. It didn't smell like
the heat of the tank's engines; it smelled like molten metal, with
undertones of burned flesh. Immediately, there was a multiple explosion
that threw him flat, as the tank's ammunition went up. There were no
screams. It was too fast for that. He opened his eyes.

The turret and top armor of the tank had vanished. The two massive
treads had been toppled over, one to either side. The body had collapsed
between them, and it was running sticky trickles of molten metal. He
blinked, rubbed his eyes on the back of his hand, and looked again. Of
all the many blasted and burned-out tanks, Soviet and UN, that he had
seen, this was the most completely wrecked thing in his experience. And
he'd done that with one grenade....

* * * * *

At that moment, there was a sudden rushing overhead, and an instant