"The directive factor in the course," said Angel, "is not where we're going but how we get there. Thus it's nothing so simple as getting into the fourth dimension, because that's a cognate field to ours and a very big place. Dead Center is wholly unique, therefore there's only one way to get there."
"And finding out that way," interjected Jackson, "was what had you in a trance for thirty hours mumbling and raving about matrix mechanics and quintessimal noduloids. Right?"
"Right," admitted Angel, shuddering a little at the recollection. "Half of the math was the most incredibly advanced stuff that you have to devote a lifetime to, and the rest I made up myself. Look." He gestured outside the window of the ship.
Obediently Jackson stared through the plastic transparency at the absolute, desolate bleakness that was everywhere around them. In spite of the small, sickening sensation in the stomach, they might as well have been stranded in space instead of rushing wildly at almost the fourth power of light's speed into nothing and still more nothing. He tore his eyes away. "Quite a sight," he said.
"Yeah. And do you know where we're going?"
"As far as I can see you've nearly reached the limit of space, Angel.
Unless my math is greatly at fault, you're going to find that we've been traveling for a month to find ourselves back where we started from.
What's the kicker you're holding?"
"The kicker, as you vulgarly call it," said Maclure, "is a neat bit of math that I doped out for myself. A few years ago I stumbled on the interesting fact that there is a natural limit to the speed-direction ratio as such. I mean, there are certain directions we can go in as long as we stay beneath this limiting constant, which I refer to as J after my Uncle Joe. Anyway, when you scrounge around with some triple integration you find out what this limiting constant is. I have found it to be the speed of light to the fifth power.
"Once you go over that the fences are down. You have another direction you can go in, and that's the direction we're going to take. Reason I went way out here, nearly to the end of space, is because when we go in that direction something spectacular ought to happen to any surrounding matter. Ready to increase speed now you know?"
"Okay," said Jackson briefly. "You're the boss. Murphy!" Another of the Amters, who was handling the controls, nodded. "Over the top?" he asked grinning.
"Darn tootin', Murph," said Angel. "Hold fast, friends."
Murphy depressed the little silver bar still farther, in one savage stab.
Actually they felt the ship leap ahead colossally, its beams straining under the unimaginable atomic stress and bombardment to which it was being subjected. Angel, his eyes on the port, gasped as he saw the jet black of space writhe with a welter of colors. "This is it," he snapped thinly. He turned a wheel at his hand, spinning it into the wall.
There was a throbbing of valves and pistons as great directive pumps ponderously went into action, grasping out to grip onto the very fabric of space itself. The ship changed direction then, in some weird and unexplainable manner. Speaking mathematically, the equation of the ship's dynamics altered as the factor J inoperated conversely. But from what Angel saw he doubted all his math and science. This firmest mind in the galaxy wondered if it were going mad.
4
Beneath them swam an incalculably huge plain, curiously dim under a diffused light from high overhead. The vast expanse stretched as far as the eye could see, and there were moving lumps on its surface that shifted strangely without seeming to move.
Jackson screamed grotesquely. Then as Angel caught his eye and held it he smiled sheepishly. "Imagine!" he grinned. "Me going off my rocker!
But this place looks like hell to me, Angel—honest it does. What do you make of it?"
"Don't know," said Angel quietly. "But it's more than appearances that makes an Amter scream that way. What did you pick up?"
"Can't fool you, I guess. I felt something—a very strong, clear thought band. And I didn't like it one little bit. Now that's unusual. There isn't a single thought-pattern in creation that's that way. Usually your feelings are mixed. Once you really get into a person's mind you find out that you can't hate him. You're bound to find something good.
"Even Mr. Sapphire, that horrid old octopus, has a spark of worship in him, and a very fine, keen feeling for beauty. But the band I just got—"
Jackson shuddered and looked sick.
"We're soaring, Murph," directed Maclure. The ship skimmed lightly over the plain, Angel busily staring through the ports. "Whatever the damn things are," he commented, "they don't move in any normal perceivable manner. They don't traverse space, I think. Just see: they're in one place and then in another. You meet some very strange people in these parts, I think."
Crash! The ship came to a sickening halt. Angel, not wasting a word, pulled his blue-steel automatics. "The only original and authentic superman," he.said in hard, even tones, "feels that dirty work is being done."
The Memnon settled to the ground and was surrounded by the big, grey lumps with the disconcerting ability to move without moving. Jackson shuddered. "That's it," he whispered. "Thoughtband of pure evil and hate. I could kill them for just existing."
"Hold it," said Angel quietly. "See if you can get a message from them. I think something's coming through."
They must have been concentrating on the occupants of the craft, for even he could feel it without effort, and to the psychologically trained and sensitive Amters it came as a buffeting blow. "Come out!" was the message, sent with deadly dull insistence and power. "Come out! Come out! Come out!"
Angel pocketed his guns. "We'd better," he said. "If I make no mistake these people can back themselves up. And if they had any intention of destroying us right out, I think they could have done it."
The seven Amters and Angel filed from the ship into the chill, sweetish air of the dim plain. The grey lumps surrounded them, confronting Angel. He studied the creatures and saw that they had rudimentary features. As he guessed at their evolution they must be the end-product of an intensely intellectual and emotional race. All this, of course, subject to alteration by the unguessable influence of their surroundings.
The stolid, battering thought-waves came again. "Mr. Sapphire told us of you. He has threatened us and we know that he is powerful. We shall hold you for his disposal. He said that you were swifter than he but not as powerful and we should not fear you. If you do not wish us to believe that, you must prove otherwise."
"Ask him," Angel said to Jackson, "how Mr. Sapphire threatened them."
Jackson knit his brows and Maclure could feel the pulsing communication. Promptly the creatures answered: "He locked us into time. He is very wise and knows things about time that we do not."
They were either primitive or degenerate, thought Maclure, and probably the latter from their advanced physical make-up. Perhaps he could try the time stunt himself. He whipped out a minute set of tools and selected a fairly complicated little projector. He varied the pitch of its lenses and filaments rapidly and addressed the creatures directly:
"As Mr. Sapphire has done, I can too. See!"
He snapped on the device, praying that his estimate of the natural properties of this half-world had not gone awry. And he had not prayed in vain, for all those creatures whom the little beam of ionized air impinged on froze stiffly into a full-fledged stoppage in time. "Let Mr.
Sapphire beat that!" he grunted, releasing them.
Crash! The titanic detonation of a trinite bomb shattered the ground a half-mile away into a soft-spreading fog. Through the trembling air there spread the terrible whisper of the master of Morlens: "Can and will, Angel! I warned you. You were faster, but I got to them first. Look up!"
Above them was hanging a sister craft to the Memnon, but a sickly green in hue. Said Sapphire: "Do not move or I shall release the second bomb. You underestimated these good people of mine. They are the Grey Watchers of the Silence. They are the ones to whom hate is all, and who will aid no good. With the
ir aid I located you in your little display and with their aid I reached this world only a moment after you. And with their aid I shall become master of the Center, Angel Maclure. Now speak if you wish."
"Muscles," prayed Angel, "do your damndest!" Acting independently his two hands leaped from his pockets grasping the snub-nosed automatics that he knew so well. While the left hand blasted the closing circle of the Watchers into pulpy fragments, the right hand was pouring a steady stream of explosive pellets into the belly of the craft above. With such stunning speed had he acted that it was not the fifth part of a second before the grey circle around them had been broken wide open and the ship above was heeling over sickly with a gaping, shattered wound in its hull.
"Come on!" spat Maclure to the Amters. And in another fifth of a second they were in the ship and tearing wildly over the grey plain. "It'll take them ten minutes at least to get going with what I did to them. Make tracks! In ten minutes we land and get to work!"
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 stern, 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.
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 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.
His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction Page 95
