The Sci-Fi Stories - Cyril M. Kornbluth Edition. Cyril M. Kornbluth

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      About them rose the gigantic ribs of the super-spacer that Angel Maclure had undertaken to build. Nervously he glanced at his watch to confirm his own acute time-sense. “Three hours since we landed,” he complained. “Can’t you put some steam into it?”

      “They’re doing their best,” said Jackson. “We aren’t all supermen, y’know. About this statistics business here—how do you arrive at these coordinates?”

      “Never mind,” snapped Angel. “If Maclure says it’s right you can bet your boots on it. We haven’t time to check.”

      “Then that finishes the calculations,” yawned Jackson. “By your own words the Dead Center should rise from some unidentified spot in this damn plain some minutes hence.”

      “Right. And what it’ll look like and how we’ll know we’ve found it is only one of the things I don’t know. That’s where Mr. Sapphire has the lead on us again. He’s hand-in-glove with the Watchers, and if any race is expert on the Center they must be. Suppose you turn your mind to the psychological problem of what in Hades these Watchers expect to get out of all this.”

      “Evil, I think,” said Jackson slowly. “Nothing but their unalloyed instinct for mischief and destruction. You may find it hard to understand that line of thinking; I, being of the same basic stock as the Morlens do not. They are a shallow example of that perfection toward which the Watchers strive. This is a very strange land, Angel.”

      “I know that,” snapped Maclure. “And I don’t like it one bit more than I have to. The sooner we get our work done and well done, I’m making tracks. And the Center, once I’ve fixed Mr. Sapphire, can go plumb to hell and gone.” He stared at the ship which was reaching completion. “Get that on!” he roared as a crew of three gingerly swung his original power-unit into place.

      Jackson smiled quietly. “How much longer?” he asked.

      “Dunno,” said Angel. “But that’s the last plate. Quite a hull we have there—what with transmutation and things. I didn’t think it’d work with the elements of this world, but why not? Good job, anyway. Thousand yards from stem to stem, fifty yards from keel to truck. I don’t see how they can crack her.” But his face showed lines of worry.

      “What’s eating you?” asked Jackson.

      “Mr. Sapphire,” exploded Angel. “Always a jump ahead of us everywhere we turn—what do you make of it? How can we be sure there isn’t a catch to the whole business?”

      “I know the feeling,” said Jackson. “Hey!” he yelled suddenly, looking up. One of the workers who had been spreading on a paste which dried to the metal of the hull, was gesturing horribly as though in a convulsive fit. His voice reached them in a strangled wail, and then suddenly he was himself again, waving cheerily.

      “Thought I was going to fall!” he called.

      “Yeah?” asked Jackson. He snapped a little tube from his pocket and cold-bloodedly rayed the Amter. He fell horribly charred.

      The Angel incinerated the corpse with his own heat-ray and turned to Jackson. “You must have had a reason for that,” he commented. “What was it?”

      “He wasn’t our man,” said Jackson, shaken. “They’ve found where we are and got some other mind into his body. It was the other one that I killed; our man was dead already.”

      “Ah,” said Angel. “Let’s get out of this.” He sprang into the half-finished ship. “Hold fast and keep on working,” he roared to the men who were clinging to the framework. Then he took off, handling the immense control-board with the ease of a master.

      In only a few minutes the rest of the men came inside. The ship was not luxurious but it was roomy and fast, and the hull was stored with weapons and screen-projectors of immense power. “Going up,” said the Angel. Delighting in the smooth-handling speed of the immense craft he zoomed high into the thin air of the weird half-world.

      “Look,” whispered Jackson. And in the very center of the control room there was appearing a semi-solid mass that took the shape of Mr. Sapphire. It greeted Angel in the voiceless whisper that was its voice: “Maclure, can your mechanics master this or even match it? You see a projection out of my body—once called ectoplasmic.

      “With this implement and extension of me I could strangle you to death, for ectoplasm knows no limitations of cross-sectional strength. My Watchers have taught me much, and what they did not know I supplied from my century of meditation. We are the symbiosis of evil, Angel. Do you yield now?”

      Maclure’s fingers danced over the immense keyboard that semicircled around him, setting up the combination of a snap-calculated field. “Beat this!” he taunted, plunging home a switch. And a plane of glowing matter intersected horizontally with the projection, cutting it cleanly in half.

      “So!” rasped the whisper of Mr. Sapphire. “We shall do battle in earnest, Angel Maclure. I am coming for you!” The severed projection faded away.

      CHAPTER V.

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      Like a comet from nowhere a second ship roared into the sky, fully as large as the Angel’s.

      “Now how the hell did he manage to build that?” worried Maclure. “I thought I had the monopoly on transmutation and psycho-construction. Get a line on that, Jackson.”

      His sidekick, brow furrowed, answered slowly: “From what I can hear he did it the hard way—forged his metal and welded it together. But that must have taken him four or five months, at least. Wait a—that’s it. The Watchers worked a stoppage of time for him so that he’s been working on his armaments and ship for a year while we built our thing in three hours. Isn’t that dirty?”

      “Dirty as hell,” said the Angel busily. He was feinting the ship this way and that, now closing in, now roaring a light-year distant. “Get the men at battle-stations, will you? Work it out among them. I want to be alone here.”

      The Angel zoomed in swiftly and shot out one sizzling beam of solid force as a feeler. It was to his surprise that it touched the ship and charred the hull. But, he worried, it should have more than charred it. He closed in again and shot out his very best repeller ray. It caught the other ship square amidships and heeled it over in a great spin for control. While it floundered he stabbed at it with a needle-ray.

      The sharp-pointed, unbearably brilliant beam struck into the flank of the ship and bored fiercely. Then it was shaken off, and Maclure shot far and away out of range. Under cover of a cloud of smoke which he released from a jet he scattered a few hundred of the osmium pellets into space.

      “Come on!” he muttered to himself, shooting a tractor ray at the other ship. He could hear trembling in the power room the tortured whine of his generators, and could see the agonizing vibrations of the other ship. Almost an impasse it seemed, when with a jerk the other ship lost ground and slid clean into the path of the artificial meteorites.

      The Angel grunted with satisfaction as he saw myriad punctures appear in the hull. Then the already-battered ship disappeared behind a dull red glow. “Screens,” he muttered. He snapped on his own, leaving open only a small observation-port. This, he noticed, the others did not have. His vantage.

      From behind the screen of the other ship crept a tenebrous cloud. Angel backed away. He didn’t like the look of the thing, whatever it was. In rapid succession he rayed it with everything he had. But nothing happened. It could not be burned nor frozen, nor ionized, nor attracted nor repelled. With a sinister persistence it reached out farther yet as he backed off stalkily.

      Almost in a panic the Angel aimed and released one of his preciously hoarded torpedos. The blunt, three-ton killer, packed solid with destruction, plunged squarely through the blackness and exploded colossally but to no avail