Page:Stirring Science Stories, February 1941.djvu/21

 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?" Jackson. He snapped a little tube from his pocket and cold-bloodedly rayed the Amter. He fell horribly charred.

The 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 the 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 semisolid 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 com ing for you!" The severed projection faded away.

IKE 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