Obeying he knew not what insane impulse, 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 hot 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 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.
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," Angel admitted modestly.
Interference
"Take it easy, now," warned the President of the United States. "A lot depends on you—don't go off half-cocked. You only get one chance.
That's all we can afford."
Boyle took the extended hand and shook it heartily. "We'll certainly do our best, sir," he said. And from the tone of his voice you could tell that he meant it.
The vast field was crowded; beneath the hot summer sun sweated twenty thousand people, surging, cheering, breaking through cordons of police lined up for their own protection. Dips were doing a thriving business; more than one light-fingered gentleman was planning to retire on the rich pickings from the crowd. People were far too excited to consider whether or not it was their own hands in their pockets or that of some total stranger of predatory instincts. The crowd was in a holiday mood, exalted to be in the same rocket field with Boyle and Cantrell.
The two objects of adoration were bearing up well under the strain, humble psychologists though they had been up to a few weeks ago.
After shaking the President's hand and being clapped on their backs by enough distinguished foreigners to fill an embassy the size of the great pyramid, they were blushing a little and very happy at their good fortune.
"But," whispered Boyle from the corner of his mouth, "if we don't come back they'll know we died trying." Suddenly grim, he surveyed the vast sea of faces stretching before him. An emcee took him by the arm and led him to a mike through which he would address the crowd.
"Hello—" he began, and then broke off, startled by the sound of his own voice roaring out across the field. "Hello, all you people. My partner and I just want to thank you before we leave in the Andros. If we don't return send out more men, men better than Cantrell and I. Because we aren't coming back before we crack the problem that's assigned to us.
When—if—you see the jets of the old Andros in the sky again, maybe in a week, maybe in a year, you'll know that the answer is in our hands and that the plague, the spastitis, is over. Or as good as over."
The roar that went up from the crowd was deafening as he modestly stepped back from the mike. The emcee was yelling things into it, but the tremendous ovation drowned out even the tornado of sound that the loudspeakers created.
Boyle waved at the crowd again. "All ready?" he snapped at Cantrell, his partner in the enterprise. "Everything checked?"
"Betcha life," said Cantrell. "Get in." Like an insect disappearing in the knothole of a giant tree trunk, Boyle eased through the tiny port in the grey, slab-sided hull of the Andros. Cantrell vaulted in immediately after him, and the huge plug of metal that sealed the ship swung into place from the inside.
The crowd had quieted, and the annunciators roared warnings to stand back from the breath of the fiery Titan that soon would roar its own message. Police cleared the mob away from the firing area with squad cars driving masses of people before them. Hastily the reviewing stand was rolled away from the ship.
The President got into his car, a long, low open Jefferson 22. He looked a little ill. "I hope they make it," he said, with a visible effort. "They're plucky young—" Then he could no longer contain himself. He began to cough violently, his hands trembling toward his mouth.
Doctors clustered around as he collapsed. Even in unconsciousness his body twitched grotesquely and his finely modeled hands trembled as if with cold. "He's got it," said one surgeon grimly. "The President has spastitis. It's spreading faster than we thought. And there go the dream-boys who have to get out into space to find a cure." He gestured at the Andros, which was ponderously aiming itself at the zenith with its own self-elevators.
With a mind-staggering crash the ship took off. The wind of its departure almost tore clothes from the surgeons at the Presidential car.
Long after it had vanished—seemingly dead into the sun—their ears rang with the concussion, and breezes stiffly whipped along the field.
Cantrell grinned feebly from the bunk. "I'm all right," he said weakly. "I can get up. This damned space-sickness gets me every time. You ready to try out the polyphone?"
The hardy Boyle grinned back through a tangle of electronics supplies.
"It's all rigged up and ready for you. Catch." He tossed over a set of headphones connected with the machinery and donned a similar set of his own. "Relax," he warned. "If we're not far enough out this ought to be a full-blooded shock to mind and body." He switched on a dull-glowing tube.
Cantrell squinted his eyes shut and concentrated on the familiar thought patterns of his partner. He caught them for a moment. Boyle was thinking of the blackness of space through which they were speeding and wondering vaguely whether the meteor interceptor would work as well under stress as it had in the tests. He held up a hand with thumb and forefinger meeting, both crooked, in the time-honored technicians' gesture of: coming over 100%.
Then there was a sudden rip in the smoothly unreeling pattern. It was as though a panorama were being opened before his eyes; the panorama of his partner's mind. Then a seam opened suddenly and without warning. He was reading the minds of total strangers, people he'd never heard of.
In rapid sequence he caught the image of a grubby little room as seen by a short man, and then surges of physical disgust at the sight—
through this short stranger's eyes—of a big, muscular woman.
Following that image and impression was a vision of staring dead into the sun, some fool who was looking for their ship, no doubt. Back to the grubby room, but this time seen from the slightly higher elevation of the muscular woman, who obviously didn't like the little man she focused on any more than he liked her.