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Angel, his mind buzzing with figures and colossal statistics, had aimlessly wandered into the proving room. Assistants leaped to attention, for he was known as a captain in the Tri-Planet Guard. And the ship and plotting were, of course, official business. That was only one of the many ways in which his work had been made easier. But work it still was—the hardest, most gruelling kind of work of which any man could be capable. The first job he had ordered had been the construction of immense calculating machines of a wholly novel type. He could not waste his own time and his own energy on the job of simple mathematics. He just showed up with the equations and theoretical work well mapped out and let the machines or his assistants finish it off.

“At ease,” he called. “Get back to work, kids.” He ambled over to the main structural forge and confronted the foreman. “Rawson,” he said, “as I planned it this job should be finished by now.”

Rawson, burly and hard, stared at the Angel with something like contempt. “You planned wrong,” he said, and spat.

Angel caught him flat-footed. After one belt on the chin Rawson was down and out. “How much longer on this job?” he asked a helper.

“Nearly done now, sir. Who’s stuck with the proving-ground tests?”

“Nobody’s stuck. I’m taking her out myself.”

With something like concern the helper eyed Maclure. “I don’t know, sir,” he volunteered. “In my opinion it isn’t safe.”

“Thanks,” said the Angel with a grin. “That’s what we aim to find out.” He climbed into the ship—small and stubby, with unorthodox fins and not a sign of a respectable atmospheric or spacial drive-unit, and nosed around. He grunted with satisfaction. No spit-and-polish about this job—just solid work. To the men who were working a buffer-wheel against the hull he called, “That’s enough. I’m taking her out now.” They touched their caps, and there was much whispering as Maclure closed the bulkhead.

* * * * *

With a light, sure touch he fingered the controls and eased the ship inches off the ground, floating it to the take-off field, deeply furrowed with the scars of thousands of departing rockets. There was no fanfare or hullabaloo as he depressed the engraved silver bar on the extreme right of the dash. But in response to that finger-touch the ship simply vanished from the few observers and a gale whipped their clothes about them.

Maclure was again in the black of space, the blinking stars lancing through the infinitely tough plastic windows. And he was travelling at a speed which had never before been approached by any man. “Huh!” he grunted. “I always knew I could work it out.” He saw the moon in the distance—about a million miles behind and to starboard.

Deliberately he cut into the plane of the ecliptic, determined to take on any meteorites that might be coming. He had a deflection device that needed testing.

Through the clear window before him he saw a jagged chunk of rock far off, glinting in the sun. Deliberately he set out to intersect with its path. As they met there was a tension in the atmosphere of the ship that set his hair on end. But there was no shock as he met the meteorite; he did not meet it at all, for when it was about a yard from the ship it shimmered and seemed to vanish.

Maclure was satisfied; the distortion unit was in order. And the chances of meeting anything so freakish as a meteorite were so small that he did not need any further protection. He was whistling happily as he headed back to Earth.

Then, abruptly, there was a peculiar chiming resonance to the idling whisper of the drive-units. And in the back of Angel’s head a little chord seemed to sound. It was like something remembered and forgotten again. Scarcely knowing what he was saying and not caring at all he called softly: “I can hear you!”

The chiming sound mounted shrilly, seemed to be struggling to form words. Finally, in a silvery tinkle of language he heard: “We’re superhet with your malloidin coils. Can’t keep it up like this. Full stop—all power in malloidin for reception. Okay?”

That, at least, he could understand. Someone had performed the almost impossible task of superhetrodyning some sort of nodular wave of constant phase-velocity into a coil set up as an anchor-band! He groaned at the thought of the power it must have taken and flung the ship to a halt, reversing his power to flow through the anchoring coil that was receiving the message. It sounded again: “That’s better. Can you make it 7:7:3, please?”

He snapped insulated gloves on his hands and adjusted the armature windings. “God knows where they get their juice from,” he thought. “But I hope they have plenty of it.”

“We can’t hear you, Angel Maclure,” said the voice from the coils. “This must be going through to you, though, because you’ve followed our requests. I can’t get detailed, because this little message will burn out every power-plant we have. Do not return to Earth. Do not return to Earth. Do you get that? Come instead to coordinates x-3, y-4.5, z-.1—get that? three, four point five, point one. We’ll be able to contact you further there. But whatever you do, don’t return to Earth. Signing off—”

The metallic voice clicked into silence. Maclure, mind racing, grabbed for a star-map. The coordinates indicated in the message were those of a fairly distant and thinly-filled sector of space. He hesitated. Why the hell not? No man had ever been beyond Pluto, but was he a man?

He grinned when he remembered his tight-fisted, close-mouthed father who had made him what he was with a gruelling course of training that began actually before he was born.

Yes, he decided, he was a man all right, and with all of a man’s insatiable curiosity he set his course for the distant cubic parsec that was indicated by the coordinates he had so strangely heard through a drive-unit receiver. And with all the fantastic speed of which his craft was capable he did not want to drive it beyond its capacity. Having set the controls he relaxed in a sort of trance in preparation for his week-long trip.

* * * * *

After locating himself among the unfamiliar stars of his destination he rearranged his coils. “That wasn’t necessary,” they said almost immediately in the metallic chimes. “We’re coming out for you.” Then they fell silent. But minutes later a craft hove alongside and fastened onto his hull with a sort of sucker arrangement. It was no larger than his own, but somehow sleeker and simpler in its lines.

They had clamped right over his bulkhead and were hammering on it. He opened up, trusting to luck and logic that their atmosphere was not chlorinous. “Come in,” he called.

“Thanks,” said the foremost of three ordinary individuals. “My name’s Jackson.”

“Yeah?” asked Maclure, staring at him hard. He was dressed exactly as Maclure was dressed, and his features were only slightly different.

Jackson smiled deprecatingly. “You’re right,” he said. “But you can call me Jackson anyway. I’d rather not show you my real shape. Okay?”

“You should know best,” shrugged the Angel. “Now tell me what’s up.”

“Gladly,” said Jackson, settling himself in a chair with a curiously loose-jointed gesture. “You’re not very much of a superman, you know.”

“Pardon the contradiction,” said the Angel ominously, “But I happen to know for a fact that I’m very far above the normal human being.”

“Intellectually,” said Jackson. “Not emotionally. And that’s very important. You don’t mind my speaking plainly?”

“Not at all.”

“Very well. You’re much like an extremely brilliant child. You have a downright genius for mechanics and physical sciences, but your understanding of human relationships is very sub-average. That must be why you were so badly taken in by Mr. Sapphire.”

“Taken in?” reflected the Angel. “I don’t think he fooled me. I knew that he’d try to get me out of the way—murder or otherwise—as soon as he got what he wanted from me. I trusted myself to take care of him.”

“Good, but not reasoned far enough. Did it ever strike you that Mr. Sapphire—as you persist in thinking of him—was not a free agent? That he was—ah—grinding somebody else’s axe?”

“Holy smokes!” yelped Maclure. The strange discrepancies which he had bundled into the back of his mind suddenly resolved themselves into a frightening pattern.

“Exactly,” smiled Jackson. “You are the key piece in the problem. Both sides must take care of you, for if you are lost the game is at an end. Shall I begin at the beginning?”

“You’d better,” said the Angel weakly.

“Very well,” began Jackson. “Our opponents are known to us as the Morlens; we are the Amters. For some thousands of your years there has been an intermittent warfare going on between us. You must take my word for it that it is they who are bent on destroying us and that we act only in self defense. They are situated about nine parsecs away from us, which makes attack a difficult and dangerous undertaking, yet they have not hesitated to risk their entire generations in desperate attempts to wipe us out.

“Of late there had been little of that; when our spies reported they informed us that an intensive psychological campaign was going on against us. This we could repulse with ease. But we could not very well block their attempts to gain mental domination of Earth and its solar system. They did not, of course, control every individual, but they reached sufficient key-persons like Mr. Sapphire to be nearly masters of your world.”

“One moment,” interrupted the Angel. “I can assure you that Mr. Sapphire knew that they were at work on him. I also believe that he only pretended submission. His ends were his own.”

“Perhaps,” Jackson shrugged. “At any rate, what they needed was mechanical and physical genius. And you, Angel Maclure, are the outstanding mechanical and physical genius of the universe. You can solve problems that no other mind could even approach. And the first of such problems was the one of Dead Center, which we have been investigating for many generations.”

“Investigating?” snapped Angel. “How?”

“Purely psychological investigations, such as the projection of minds within the region of the Center. This has been actually a desperate race against the Morlens, for we believe that who is master of the Center is master of the universe.”

“That’s probably true enough,” said Maclure thoughtfully. “And so you make your bid for my support?”

“We do,” said Jackson somberly.

“That’s nice,” snapped the Angel viciously. “Now get this and get it straight: I’m not playing anybody’s game but my own, and if helping you out against the damn Morlens helps me out I’ll do it. On those terms—okay?”

“Okay,” said Jackson gravely. “And you’d better begin helping us out pretty fast, because your benefactor Sapphire either relayed to or had his mind read by the Morlens, and they know the results of your calculations. They know where the Center is and, in a way, how to get there.”

“Yeah,” jeered the Angel. “Give me a piece of land and some tools and I’ll build you a space-ship that’ll make this thing look like a waterbug for size and speed!”

“Haw!” laughed Jackson, “More damn fun!”