"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 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.
5
Like a comet from nowhere a second ship roared into the sky, fully as large as 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 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."
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.
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 advantage.
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.
Almost in a panic Angel aimed and released one of his preciously hoarded torpedoes. The blunt, three-ton killer, packed solid with destruction, plunged squarely through the blackness and exploded colossally but to no avail against the red screen of the other ship.
"Whatever it is," brooded Maclure, "it can go through screens." And that wasn't good. He could do no more than watch hopelessly as it detached itself from the 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!" 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 torpedoes, 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. 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."