Only on the chance that you will in the future be of use to me do I offer to spare you. What is your answer?' The aged monster whispered in a tone of mockery: 'I shall know by your actions. Within the hour I start for the Center in a perfect duplicate of the ship you have devised for your friends. Follow or oppose and you shall take the consequences.
Now cut off?'
And from the ancient creature's mind there radiated such a stream of destructive hate that Angel winced and shut off the machine at its power lead. 'Mr. Sapphire,' he meditated aloud, 'is not all that I had thought him to be.'
Jackson grinned feebly. 'What're you going to do, Maclure?'
Angel said thoughtfully: 'Mr. Sapphire must not get to the Center before us. You heard that he was starting— we must follow. And we must work on the way.'
'He's terribly strong,' said Jackson. 'Terribly strong now that he has his own mind and a good part of yours in his grasp. How do we lick his psychological lead?'
'The only way I can and with the only weapons I got, chum. Cold science and brainwork. Now roll out that bus we have and collect the star-maps I got up. Round up every top-notch intellect you have and slug them if you have to, but at any cost get them into the ship. We're going to Dead Center, and it's a long, hard trip.'
Comfortably ensconced in the cabin of the Memnon, which was the altogether cryptic name Maclure had given the Center ship, Jackson was listening worriedly.
'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
