Page:Stirring Science Stories, February 1941.djvu/22

 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 dean into the path of the artificial meteorites.

The Angel grunted with satisfaction as he saw myriad punctures appear in the hulk Then the already-battered ship disappeared behind a dull red glow. "Screens," he muttered. He snapped on his own, leaving open only a small observationport 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 persistance 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? Thy 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