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 their 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.
