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.
CHAPTER V
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 b
rilliant 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.”
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.
Thirteen O’Clock
Peter Packer found a: clock with thirteen hours and when it struck . . . Wow! The dizziest adventure of the century!
CHAPTER I
PETER PACKER folded the carpenter’s rule and rose from his knees, brushing dust from the neat crease of his serge trousers. No doubt of it—the house had a secret attic room. Peter didn’t know anything about sliding panels or hidden buttons; in the most direct way imaginable he lifted the axe he had brought and crunched it into the wall.
On his third blow he holed through. The rush of air from the darkness was cool and sweet. Smart old boy, his grandfather, thought Peter. Direct ventilation all over the house—even in a false compartment. He chopped away heartily, the hollow strokes ringing through the empty attic and down the stairs.
He could have walked through the hole erect when he was satisfied with his labors; instead he cautiously turned a flashlight inside the space. The beam was invisible; all dust had long since settled. Peter grunted. Th
e floor seemed to be sound. He tested it with one foot, half in, half out of the hidden chamber. It held.
The young man stepped through easily, turning the flash on walls and floor. The room was not large, but it was cluttered with a miscellany of objects—chests, furniture, knick-knacks and what-nots. Peter opened a chest, wondering about pirate gold. But there was no gold, for the thing was full to the lid with chiffons in delicate hues. A faint fragrance of musk filled the air; sachets long since packed away were not entirely gone.
Funny thing to hide away, thought Peter. But Grandfather Packer had been a funny man—having this house built to his own very sound plans, waiting always on the Braintree docks for the China and India Clippers and what rare cargo they might have brought. Chiffons! Peter pocked around in the box for a moment, then closed the lid again. There were others.
He turned the beam of the light on a wall lined with shelves. Pots of old workmanship—spices and preserves, probably. And a clock. Peter stared at the clock. It was about two by two by three feet—an unusual and awkward size. The workmanship was plain, the case of crudely finished wood. And yet there was something about it—his eyes widened as he realized what it was. The dial showed thirteen hours!
Between the flat figures XII and I there was another—an equally flat XIII. What sort, of freak this was the young man did not know. Vaguely he conjectured on prayer-time, egg-boiling and all the other practical applications of chronometry. But nothing he could dredge up from his well-stored mind would square with this freak. He set the, flash on a shelf and hefted the clock in his arms, lifting it easily.
This, he thought, would bear looking into. Putting the light in his pocket he carried the clock down the stairs to his second-floor bedroom. It looked strangely incongruous there, set on a draftsman’s table hung with rules and T squares. Determinedly Peter was beginning to pry open the back with a chisel, when it glided smoothly open without tooling. There was better construction in the old timeplace than he had realized. The little hinges were still firm and in working order. He peered into the works and ticked his nail against one of the chimes. It sounded sweet and clear. The young man took a pair of pliers. Lord knew where the key was, he thought, as he began to wind the clock. He nudged the pendulum. Slowly it got under way, ticking loudly. The thing had stopped at 12:59. That would be nearly one o’clock in any other timepiece; on this the minute hand crept slowly toward the enigmatic XIII.
Collected Short Fiction Page 23