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

other ship by breaking the one slender filament which still connected it. From then on it seemed to be a free agent.

      “Playing tag with a heavy fog,” mused Angel, dancing the ship away from the cloud. It was, he saw, assuming more solid form—condensing into a more compact and still huge mass. The thing was curiously jelly-like as it crawled sluggishly through space at a few hundred miles a second.

      “Jackson!” the Angel yelled into a mike. “Get a line on that damn thing, will you? Try probing it en masse with the rest of your friends.”

      “Oke,” came back the dry tones of his lieutenant. “We did already. That stuff is ectoplasm in the most elementary form. We aren’t sure how much it has on the ball, but it might be plenty. Watch yourself—we’ll try to break it down psychologically if we can.”

      “Right,” snapped Maclure. He tried a ray on the thing again, and it seemed to be affected. Skillfully wielding the needle, he carved a hunk of the stuff off the major cloud. With incredible speed it rushed at him, and only by the narrowest of margins did he avert having the stuff plaster all over his ship.

      With a steady hand he aimed the second of his torpedos, masking its discharge under a feinting barrage of liquid bromine. The tool sped through space almost undetected, finally lodged inside the cloud. The explosion was monstrous, but ineffectual. Though the cloud had been torn into about a dozen major pieces and numberless minor ones, it immediately reformed and began stalking his ship again.

      As he drove it off with a steady barrage of repeller rays the thing seemed to expand and soften again. The agitated voice of Jackson snapped over the circuit. “Either we broke it down or it’s given up, Angel. But something’s brewing aboard their ship. They suddenly changed their major aim, somehow. Murphy says they’re looking for something—think it’s—?”

      “Dead Center!” yelled Maclure. Almost under his very eyes the only unique phenomenon in creation had suddenly appeared.

      * * * * *

      It had risen from the plain with a splashing of colors and sounds, so violent a contravention of all the rest of the universe that his ship was transparent under its colors and the roaring, constant crash of its sound threatened to crystallize and rend the framework of his body. He could do no more than collapse limply and regard it in wonder.

      The Center was, in short, everything that the rest of creation was not. In no terms at all could it be described; those which Maclure saw as light and heard as sound were, he realized, no more than the border-phenomena caused by the constant turmoil between the outer world and the Quiet Place that it surrounded.

      Angel Maclure came to with a violent start. The ectoplasmic weapon had, he saw, been allowed to disperse. There was a strange quiet in space then. He snapped a tentative spy-ray on the other ship. Its screens fell away easily. The Angel blinked. “What goes on?” he muttered. The ray penetrated easily, and as he swept it through the ship he saw not one living figure. There was nothing at the barrage-relay but a complicated calculating device with shut-offs and a lead-wire to the control booth. And everywhere the ray peered he found nothing but machinery.

      But in the booth from which the ship was guided his ray found and revealed Mr. Sapphire, alone and untended, his machinery pulsing away and the ancient, crusted skin dull and slack. In the faintest of faint whispers Angel heard Mr. Sapphire speak: “Maclure. My detector tells me you have a ray on us. Pull alongside and board me. You have safe-conduct.”

      Obeying he knew not what insane impulse the Angel heeled the ship around and clamped alongside the other. “Come on, Jackson,” he called. Together they entered the ship and easily forced the door to the control booth.

      “Mr. Sapphire,” said Maclure.

      “Maclure,” sounded the whisper. “You have beaten me, I think. For I died more than three hours ago. I cannot keep this up much longer, Angel.”

      “Died,” gasped Maclure. “How—”

      With the feeblest semblance of mockery the ancient creature whispered: “A man does not meditate for a hundred years without a moment’s pause without learning so simple a secret as the difference between life and death. I sought the Center, Maclure, that I might find youth and being again. There was not in me the urge to smash and create anew—the thing that is the trouble of every mind above the ape.

      “I see that I have failed again . . . the Center is yours. You may do many things with it—operate its laws as wisely and well as you have the more familiar laws of the outer world. Now—

      “Stop my machinery, Angel Maclure. I am a proud man, and this mockery of life in death is more than I can bear.”

      Without another word the Angel’s nimble fingers danced among the tangle of tubes and found a petcock that he turned off with a twitch of his wrist. The machinery stopped in its pulsing, and there was no difference at all save in the complicated unit that had been Mr. Sapphire.

      * * * * *

      “And was it really you that complained against the grimness of life in this place?” asked Jackson with a smile.

      The Angel, tapping away with lightning fingers at a vast calculating machine’s keyboard, looked up without ceasing from his work. “Could have been,” he admitted. “But there’s nothing like work on a grand and practical scale to make a man forget. This business of mapping out the laws and principles of a whole new kind of creation is what I might call my meat.”

      “Yeah,” jeered Jackson, “The only original and authentic superman.”

      “In person,” the Angel admitted modestly.

      The Perfect Invasion

       Table of Contents

       CHAPTER I.

       CHAPTER II.

       CHAPTER III.

       CHAPTER IV.

      Imperial Earth had subdued star after star in her drive for Galactic power, but when the sudden onslaught of an unheard-of enemy turned the tables, there was only Bartok and his Intelligence Wing to meet the invincible invaders!

      CHAPTER I.

       Table of Contents

      “Heavens!” said Bartok mildly. “And Oh, my Lord!” His face wore a curiously complex look, as though he were half stunned with shock and otherwise doubting what he saw. Said Bartok: “They can’t do this to us.” He turned decidedly from the transceiver and began to pace his office. Into his personal mike he snapped: “Send in the number one houri.”

      Babe MacNeice entered on cue. “What,” she asked, “is the matter with our overlord and preceptor?” She studied his face and dropped the smile. “Barty,” she said worriedly, “what’s wrong?”

      “Sit down,” he growled, shoving a chair at her. Looking fixedly at the ceiling he said: “I just got a report from somewhere in the neighborhood of a punky little star named Arided in Cygnus. Babe, we’re being invaded. The world is being invaded.”

      The girl laughed briefly. “Don’t be an ass,” she said.

      “It’s true,” said Bartok.

      She rose and began to pace beside him. Finally she exploded: “They can’t do this to us! They simply can’t—why, we’re the invaders; we always have been!”