NO TIME FOR TOFFEE!

By Charles F. Myers

Life was Marc's oyster, but: subversives had shot him—a ghost was ready to haunt his corpse—and Toffee was loving him to death!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy July 1952 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Just as he stepped to the microphone Marc caught sight of the swarthy man. He saw the red scar across the left eyebrow, the dull flash of metal in the large hairy hand. By then it was too late even to cry out. In the next instant the glass panel in the control booth shattered.

Marc felt an explosion of hot pain deep inside his chest. He was aware of looking around dumbly at Dick Drewson and seeing Drewson's face register shocked disbelief. Then the scene—the room, Drewson and the others—disappeared, engulfed in a blinding sheet of flame—and Marc knew he was falling....

Somewhere, in a place where time and space didn't exist, grey mists began to seeth and swirl, and withall there was an ominous rumbling. The High Council was almost in session.

In a sense, the High Council was already in session, for the Heads of the Council had developed their intellects to such an inconceivable degree that when a meeting of the Council was imminent they could send their thoughts on ahead of them and get the meeting under way even before putting in an appearance. There was an exchange of views and information long before the Heads accomplished the mundane and troublesome business of materialization. Thus it was that the mists of Limbo now rumbled with thought, counter thought and—on this particular occasion—downright aggravation, even before the arrival of the Supreme Head in the vapored chambers. There was an air of foreboding.

Having declined all vanities in the pursuit of the Ultimate Intelligence, the Heads had allowed themselves to evolve into literal representations of their titles. Directing all their energy and development to the brain and its encasement, their bodies had suffered proportionately so that now they were little more than a group of preposterously large craniums, shaggy with cerebration, bearing faces weighted with the ponderous woe of Life, Death, Eternity and other such mental ballast. Five in all, they made up a company to be avoided whatever the cost.

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