The Sci-Fi Stories - Cyril M. Kornbluth Edition. Cyril M. Kornbluth
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.
CHAPTER IV.
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 the 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, the 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 the 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 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 the 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