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Like a comet from nowhere a second ship roared into the sky, fully as large as the 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 the 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.”

The 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.

The 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 vantage.

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 stalkily.

Almost in a panic the Angel aimed and released one of his preciously hoarded torpedos. 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!” the 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 torpedos, 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. The 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 the 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 not 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 the 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.

The 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,” the Angel admitted modestly.