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 hot 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 Jaws 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.
The Castle on
Outerplanet
by S. D. Gottesman
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