Empire
by Clifford D. Simak · English · Gutenberg #28215 · 310,140 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Empire
Author: Clifford D. Simak
Release date: February 28, 2009 [eBook #28215]
Most recently updated: January 4, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EMPIRE ***
Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
EMPIRE
A Powerful Novel of Intrigue and Action
in the Not-So-Distant Future
_by_
CLIFFORD D. SIMAK
_A Complete ORIGINAL Book_, UNABRIDGED
WORLD EDITIONS, INC.
105 WEST 40TH STREET
NEW YORK 18, NEW YORK
_Copyright 1951_
_by_
WORLD EDITIONS, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
Transcriber's Note:
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note.
_CHAPTER ONE_
Spencer Chambers frowned at the spacegram on the desk before him. John
Moore Mallory. That was the man who had caused so much trouble in the
Jovian elections. The troublemaker who had shouted for an investigation
of Interplanetary Power. The man who had said that Spencer Chambers and
Interplanetary Power were waging economic war against the people of the
Solar System.
Chambers smiled. With long, well-kept fingers, he rubbed his iron-gray
mustache.
John Moore Mallory was right; for that reason, he was a dangerous man.
Prison was the place for him, but probably a prison outside the Jovian
confederacy. Perhaps one of the prison ships that plied to the edge of
the System, clear to the orbit of Pluto. Or would the prison on Mercury
be better?
Spencer Chambers leaned back in his chair and matched his fingertips,
staring at them, frowning again.
Mercury was a hard place. A man's life wasn't worth much there. Working
in the power plants, where the Sun poured out its flaming blast of heat,
and radiations sucked the energy from one's body, in six months, a year
at most, any man was finished.
Chambers shook his head. Not Mercury. He had nothing against Mallory. He
had never met the man but he rather liked him. Mallory was just a man
fighting for a principle, the same as Chambers was doing.
He was sorry that it had been necessary to put Mallory in prison. If the
man only had listened to reason, had accepted the proposals that had
been made, or just had dropped out of sight until the Jovian elections
were over ... or at least had moderated his charges. But when he had
attempted to reveal the offers, which he termed bribery, something had
to be done.
Ludwig Stutsman had handled that part of it. Brilliant fellow, this
Stutsman, but as mean a human as ever walked on two legs. A man utterly
without mercy, entirely without principle. A man who would stoop to any
depth. But a useful man, a good one to have around to do the dirty work.
And dirty work sometimes was necessary.
Chambers picked up the spacegram again and studied it. Stutsman, out on
Callisto now, had sent it. He was doing a good job out there. The Jovian
confederacy, less than one Earth year under Interplanetary domination,
was still half rebellious, still angry at being forced to turn over its
government to the hand-picked officials of Chambers' company. An iron
heel was needed and Stutsman was that iron heel.
* * * * *
So the people on the Jovian satellites wanted the release of John Moore
Mallory. "They're getting ugly," the spacegram said. It had been a
mistake to confine Mallory to Callisto. Stutsman should have thought of
that.
Chambers would instruct Stutsman to remove Mallory from the Callisto
prison, place him on one of the prison ships. Give instructions to the
captain to make things comfortable for him. When this furor had blown
over, after things had quieted down in the Jovian confederacy, it might
be possible to release Mallory. After all, the man wasn't really guilty
of any crime. It was a shame that he should be imprisoned when
racketeering rats like Scorio went scot-free right here in New York.
A buzzer purred softly and Chambers reached out to press a stud.
"Dr. Craven to see you," his secretary said. "You asked to see him, Mr.
Chambers."
"All right," said Chambers. "Send him right in."
He clicked the stud again, picked up his pen, wrote out a spacegram to
Stutsman, and signed it.
Dr. Herbert Craven stood just inside the door, his black suit wrinkled
and untidy, his sparse sandy hair standing on end.
"You sent for me," he said sourly.
"Sit down, Doctor," invited Chambers.
* * * * *
Craven sat down. He peered at Chambers through thick-lensed glasses.
"I haven't much time," he declared acidly.
"Cigar?" Chambers offered.
"Never smoke."
"A drink, then?"
"You know I don't drink," snapped Craven.
"Doctor," said Chambers, "you're the least sociable man I've ever known.
What do you do to enjoy yourself?"
"I work," said Craven. "I find it interesting."
"You must. You even begrudge the time it takes to talk with me."
"I won't deny it. What do you want this time?"
Chambers swung about to face him squarely across the desk. There was a
cold look in the financier's gray eyes and his lips were grim.
"Craven," he said, "I don't trust you. I've never trusted you. Probably
that's no news to you."
"You don't trust anyone," countered Craven. "You're watching everybody
all the time."
"You sold me a gadget I didn't need five years ago," said Chambers. "You
outfoxed me and I don't hold it against you. In fact, it almost made me
admire you. Because of that I put you under a contract, one that you and
all the lawyers in hell can't break, because someday you'll find
something valuable, and when you do, I want it. A million a year is a
high price to pay to protect myself against you, but I think it's worth
it. If I didn't think so, I'd have turned you over to Stutsman long ago.
Stutsman knows how to handle men like you."
"You mean," said Craven, "that you've found I'm working on something I
haven't reported to you."
"That's exactly it."
"You'll get a report when I have something to report. Not before."
"That's all right," said Chambers. "I just wanted you to know."
Craven got to his feet slowly. "These talks with you are so refreshing,"
he remarked.
"We'll have to have them oftener," said Chambers.
Craven banged the door as he went out.
Chambers stared after him. A queer man, the most astute scientific mind
anywhere, but not a man to be trusted.
* * * * *
The president of Interplanetary Power rose from his chair and walked to
the window. Below spread the roaring inferno of New York, greatest city
in the Solar System, a strange place of queer beauty and weighty
materialism, dreamlike in its super-skyscraper construction, but
utilitarian in its purpose, for it was a port of many planets.
The afternoon sunlight slanted through the window, softening the
iron-gray hair of the man who stood there. His shoulders almost blocked
the window, for he had the body of a fighting man, one, moreover, in
good condition. His short-clipped mustache rode with an air of dignity
above his thin, rugged mouth.
His eyes looked out on the city, but did not see it. Through his brain
went the vision of a dream that was coming true. His dream spun its
fragile net about the planets of the Solar System, about their moons,
about every single foot of planetary ground where men had gone to build
and create a second homeland--the mines of Mercury and the farms of
Venus, the pleasure-lands of Mars and the mighty domed cities on the
moons of Jupiter, the moons of Saturn and the great, cold laboratories
of Pluto.
Power was the key, supplied by the accumulators owned and rented by
Interplanetary Power. A monopoly of power. Power that Venus and Mercury
had too much of, must sell on the market, and that the other planets and
satellites needed. Power to drive huge spaceships across the void, to
turn the wheels of industry, to heat the domes on colder worlds. Power
to make possible the life and functioning of mankind on hostile worlds.
In the great power plants of Mercury and Venus, the accumulators were
charged and then shipped out to those other worlds where power was
needed. Accumulators were rented, never sold. Because they belonged at
all times to Interplanetary Power, they literally held the fate of all
the planets in their cells.
A few accumulators were manufactured and sold by other smaller
companies, but they were few and the price was high. Interplanetary saw
to that. When the cry of monopoly was raised, Interplanetary could point
to these other manufacturers as proof that there was no restraint of
trade. Under the statute no monopoly could be charged, but the cost of
manufacturing accumulators alone was protection against serious
competition from anyone.
Upon a satisfactory, efficient power-storage device rested the success
or failure of space travel itself. That device and the power it stored
were for sale by Interplanetary ... and, to all practical purposes, by
Interplanetary only.
Accordingly, year after year, Interplanetary had tightened its grip upon
the Solar System. Mercury was virtually owned by the company. Mars and
Venus were little more than puppet states. And now the government of the
Jovian confederacy was in the hands of men who acknowledged Spencer
Chambers as their master. On Earth the agents and the lobbyists
representing Interplanetary swarmed in every capital, even in the
capital of the Central European Federation, whose people were dominated
by an absolute dictatorship. For even Central Europe needed
accumulators.
"Economic dictatorship," said Spencer Chambers to himself. "That's what
John Moore Mallory called it." Well, why not? Such a dictatorship would
insure the best business brains at the heads of the governments, would
give the Solar System a business administration, would guard against the
mistakes of popular government.
Democracies were based on a false presumption--the theory that all
people were fit to rule. It granted intelligence where there was no
intelligence. It presumed ability where there was not the slightest
trace of any. It gave the idiot the same political standing as the wise
man, the crackpot the same political opportunity as the man of
well-grounded common sense, the weakling the same voice as the strong
man. It was government by emotion rather than by judgment.
* * * * *
Spencer Chambers' face took on stern lines. There was no softness left
now. The late afternoon sunlight painted angles and threw shadows and
created highlights that made him look almost like a granite mask on a
solid granite body.
There was no room for Mallory's nonsense in a dynamic, expanding
civilization. No reason to kill him--even he might have value under
certain circumstances, and no really efficient executive destroys
value--but he had to be out of the way where his mob-rousing tongue
could do no damage. The damned fool! What good would his idiotic
idealism do him on a prison spaceship?
_CHAPTER TWO_
Russell Page squinted thoughtful eyes at the thing he had created--a
transparent cloud, a visible, sharply outlined cloud of _something_. It
was visible as a piece of glass is visible, as a globe of water is
visible. There it lay, within his apparatus, a thing that shouldn't be.
"I believe we have something there, Harry," he said slowly.
Harry Wilson sucked at the cigarette that drooped from the corner of his
mouth, blew twin streams of smoke from his nostrils. His eyes twitched
nervously.
"Yeah," he said. "Anti-entropy."
"All of that," said Russell Page. "Perhaps a whole lot more."
"It stops all energy change," said Wilson, "as if time stood still and
things remained exactly as they were when time had stopped."
"It's more than that," Page declared. "It conserves not only energy _in
toto_, not only the energy of the whole, but the energy of the part. It
is perfectly transparent, yet it has refractive qualities. It won't
absorb light because to do so would change its energy content. In that
field, whatever is hot stays hot, whatever is cold can't gain heat."
He scraped his hand over a week's growth of beard, considering. From his
pocket he took a pipe and a leather pouch. Thoughtfully he filled the
pipe and lit it.
It had started with his experiments in Force Field 348, an experiment to
observe the effects of heating a conductor in that field. It had been
impossible to heat the conductor electrically, for that would have upset
the field, changed it, twisted it into something else. So he had used a
Bunsen burner.
Through half-closed eyes, he still could see that slender strand of
imperm wire, how its silvery length had turned to red under the blue
flame. Deep red at first and then brighter until it flamed in almost
white-hot incandescence. And all the while the humming of the
transformer as the force field built up. The humming of the transformer
and the muted roaring of the burner and the glowing heat in the length
of wire.
Something had happened then ... an awesome something. A weird wrench as
if some greater power, some greater law had taken hold. A glove of
force, invisible, but somehow sensed, had closed about the wire and
flame. Instantly the roaring of the burner changed in tone; an odor of
gas spewed out of the vents at its base. Something had cut off the flow
of flame in the brass tube. Some force, _something_ ...
The flame was a transparent cloud. The blue and red of flame and hot
wire had changed, in the whiplash of a second, to a refractive but
transparent cloud that hung there within the apparatus.
* * * * *
The red color had vanished from the wire as the blue had vanished from
the flame. The wire was shining. It wasn't silvery; it wasn't white.
There was no hint of color, just a refractive blur that told him the
wire was there. Colorless reflection. _And that meant perfect
reflection!_ The most perfect reflectors reflect little more than 98 per
cent of the light incident and the absorption of the two per cent colors
those reflectors as copper or gold or chromium. But the imperm wire
within that force field that had been flame a moment before, was
reflecting _all_ light.
He had cut the wire with a pair of shears and it had still hung,
unsupported, in the air, unchanging within the shimmer that constituted
something no man had ever seen before.
"You can't put energy in," said Page, talking to himself, chewing the
bit of his pipe. "You can't take energy out. It's still as hot as it
was at the moment the change came. But it can't radiate any of that
heat. It can't radiate any kind of energy."
Why, even the wire was reflective, so that it couldn't absorb energy and
thus disturb the balance that existed within that bit of space. Not only
energy itself was preserved, but the very form of energy.
But why? That was the question that hammered at him. Why? Before he
could go ahead, he had to know why.
Perhaps the verging of the field toward Field 349? Somewhere in between
those two fields of force, somewhere within that almost non-existent
borderline which separated them, he might find the secret.
Rising to his feet, he knocked out his pipe.
"Harry," he announced, "we have work to do."
Smoke drooled from Wilson's nostrils.
"Yeah," he said.
Page had a sudden urge to lash out and hit the man. That eternal
drooling of smoke out of his nostrils, that everlasting cigarette
dangling limply from one corner of his mouth, the shifty eyes, the dirty
fingernails, got on his nerves.
But Wilson was a mechanical genius. His hands were clever despite the
dirty nails. They could fashion pinhead cameras and three-gram
electroscopes or balances capable of measuring the pressure of
electronic impacts. As a laboratory assistant he was unbeatable. If only
he wouldn't answer every statement or question with that nerve-racking
'yeah'!
Page stopped in front of a smaller room, enclosed by heavy quartz.
Inside that room was the great bank of mercury-vapor rectifiers. From
them lashed a blue-green glare that splashed against his face and
shoulders, painting him in angry, garish color. The glass guarded him
from the terrific blast of ultra-violet light that flared from the pool
of shimmering molten metal, a terrible emanation that would have flayed
a man's skin from his body within the space of seconds.
* * * * *
The scientist squinted his eyes against the glare. There was something
in it that caught him with a deadly fascination. The personification of
power--the incredibly intense spot of incandescent vapor, the tiny
sphere of blue-green fire, the spinning surge of that shining pool, the
intense glare of ionization.
Power ... the breath of modern mankind, the pulse of progress.
In an adjacent room were the accumulators. Not Interplanetary
accumulators, which he would have had to rent, but ones he had bought
from a small manufacturer who turned out only ten or fifteen thousand a
year ... not enough to bother Interplanetary.
Gregory Manning had made it possible for him to buy those accumulators.
Manning had made many things possible in this little laboratory hidden
deep within the heart of the Sierras, many miles from any other
habitation.
Manning's grandfather, Jackson Manning, had first generated the
curvature field and overcome gravity, had left his grandson a fortune
that approached the five-billion mark. But that had not been all. From
his famous ancestor, Manning had inherited a keen, sharp, scientific
mind. From his mother's father, Anthony Barret, he had gained an astute
business sense. But unlike his maternal grandfather, he had not turned
his attention entirely to business. Old Man Barret had virtually ruled
Wall Street for almost a generation, had become a financial myth linked
with keen business sense, with an uncanny ability to handle men and
money. But his grandson, Gregory Manning, had become known to the world
in a different way. For while he had inherited scientific ability from
one side of the family, financial sense from the other, he likewise had
inherited from some other ancestor--perhaps remote and unknown--a
wanderlust that had taken him to the farthest outposts of the Solar
System.
* * * * *
It was Gregory Manning who had financed and headed the rescue expedition
which took the first Pluto flight off that dark icebox of a world when
the exploration ship had crashed. It was he who had piloted home the
winning ship in the Jupiter derby, sending his bulleting craft screaming
around the mighty planet in a time which set a Solar record. It was
Gregory Manning who had entered the Venusian swamps and brought back,
alive, the mystery lizard that had been reported there. And he was the
one who had flown the serum to Mercury when the lives of ten thousand
men depended upon the thrumming engines that drove the shining ship
inward toward the Sun.
Russell Page had known him since college days. They had worked out their
experiments together in the school laboratories, had spent long hours
arguing and wondering ... debating scientific theories. Both had loved
the same girl, both had lost her, and together they had been bitter over
it ... drowning their bitterness in a three-day drunk that made campus
history.
After graduation Gregory Manning had gone on to world fame, had roamed
over the face of every planet except Jupiter and Saturn, had visited
every inhabited moon, had climbed Lunar mountains, penetrated Venusian
swamps, crossed Martian deserts, driven by a need to see and experience
that would not let him rest. Russell Page had sunk into obscurity, had
buried himself in scientific research, coming more and more to aim his
effort at the discovery of a new source of power ... power that would be
cheap, that would destroy the threat of Interplanetary dictatorship.
Page turned away from the rectifier room.
"Maybe I'll have something to show Greg soon," he told himself. "Maybe,
after all these years...."
* * * * *
Forty minutes after Page put through the call to Chicago, Gregory
Manning arrived. The scientist, watching for him from the tiny lawn that
surrounded the combined home and laboratory, saw his plane bullet into
sight, scream down toward the little field and make a perfect landing.
Hurrying toward the plane as Gregory stepped out of it, Russell noted
that his friend looked the same as ever, though it had been a year or
more since he had seen him. The thing that was discomfiting about Greg
was his apparently enduring youthfulness.
He was clad in jodhpurs and boots and an old tweed coat, with a
brilliant blue stock at his throat. He waved a hand in greeting and
hurried forward. Russ heard the grating of his boots across the gravel
of the walk.
Greg's face was bleak; it always was. A clean, smooth face, hard, with
something stern about the eyes.
His grip almost crushed Russ's hand, but his tone was crisp. "You
sounded excited, Russ."
"I have a right to be," said the scientist. "I think I have found
something at last."
"Atomic power?" asked Manning. There was no flutter of excitement in his
voice, just a little hardening of the lines about his eyes, a little
tensing of the muscles in his cheeks.
Russ shook his head. "Not atomic energy. If it's anything, it's material
energy, the secret of the energy of matter."
They halted before two lawn chairs.
"Let's sit down here," invited Russ. "I can tell it to you out here,
show it to you afterward. It isn't often I can be outdoors."
"It is a fine place," said Greg. "I can smell the pines."
The laboratory perched on a ledge of rugged rock, nearly 7,000 feet
above sea level. Before them the land swept down in jagged ruggedness
to a valley far below, where a stream flashed in the noonday sun. Beyond
climbed pine-clad slopes and far in the distance gleamed shimmering
spires of snow-capped peaks.
From his leather jacket Russ hauled forth his pipe and tobacco, lighted
up.
"It was this way," he said. Leaning back comfortably he outlined the
first experiment. Manning listened intently.
"Now comes the funny part," Russ added. "I had hopes before, but I
believe this is what put me on the right track. I took a metal rod, a
welding rod, you know. I pushed it into that solidified force field, if
that is what you'd call it ... although that doesn't describe it. The
rod went in. Took a lot of pushing, but it went in. And though the field
seemed entirely transparent, you couldn't see the rod, even after I had
pushed enough of it in so it should have come out the other side. It was
as if it hadn't entered the sphere of force at all. As if I were just
telescoping the rod and its density were increasing as I pushed, like
pushing it back into itself, but that, of course, wouldn't have been
possible."
He paused and puffed at his pipe, his eyes fixed on the snowy peaks far
in the purple distance. Manning waited.
"Finally the rod came out," Russ went on. "Mind you, it came out, even
after I would have sworn, if I had relied alone upon my eyes, that it
hadn't entered the sphere at all. _But it came out ninety degrees
removed from its point of entry!_"
"Wait a second," said Manning. "This doesn't check. Did you do it more
than once?"
"I did it a dozen times and the results were the same each time. But you
haven't heard the half of it. When I pulled that rod out--yes, I could
pull it out--it was a good two inches shorter than when I had pushed it
in. I couldn't believe that part of it. It was even harder to believe
than that the rod should come out ninety degrees from its point of
entry. I measured the rods after that and made sure. Kept an accurate
record. Every single one of them lost approximately two inches by being
shoved into the sphere. Every single one of them repeated the phenomenon
of curving within the sphere to come out somewhere else than where I had
inserted them."
* * * * *
"Any explanation of it?" asked Manning, and now there was a cold chill
of excitement in his voice.
"Theories, no real explanations. Remember that you can't see the rod
after you push it into the sphere. It's just as if it isn't there.
Well, maybe it isn't. You can't disturb anything within that sphere or
you'd change the sum of potential-kinetic-pressure energies within it.
The sphere seems dedicated to that one thing ... it cannot change. If
the rod struck the imperm wire within the field, it would press the wire
down, would use up energy, decrease the potential energy. So the rod
simply had to miss it somehow. I believe it _moved into some higher
plane of existence and went around_. And in doing that it had to turn so
many corners, so many fourth-dimensional corners, that the length was
used up. Or maybe it was increased in density. I'm not sure. Perhaps no
one will ever know."
"Why didn't you tell me about this sooner?" demanded Manning. "I should
have been out here helping you. Maybe I wouldn't be much good, but I
might have helped."
"You'll have your chance," Russ told him. "We're just starting. I wanted
to be sure I had something before I troubled you. I tried other things
with that first sphere. I found that metal pushed through the sphere
will conduct an electrical current, which is pretty definite proof that
the metal isn't within the sphere at all. Glass can be forced through it
without breaking. Not flexible glass, but rods of plain old brittle
glass. It turns without breaking, and it also loses some of its length.
Water can be forced through a tube inserted in the sphere, but only when
terrific pressure is applied. What that proves I can't even begin to
guess."
"You said you experimented on the first sphere," said Manning. "Have you
made others?"
Russ rose from his chair.
"Come on in, Greg," he said, and there was a grin on his face. "I have
something you'll have to see to appreciate."
* * * * *
The apparatus was heavier and larger than the first in which Russ had
created the sphere of energy. Fed by a powerful accumulator battery,
five power leads were aimed at it, centered in the space between four
great copper blocks.
Russ's hand went out to the switch that controlled the power. Suddenly
the power beams flamed, changed from a dull glow into an intense, almost
intolerable brilliance. A dull grumble of power climbed up to a steady
wail.
The beams had changed color, were bluish now, the typical color of
ionized air. They were just power beams, meeting at a common center, but
somehow they were queer, too, for though they were capable of slashing
far out into space, they were stopped dead. Their might was pouring into
a common center and going no farther. A splash of intensely glowing
light rested over them, then began to rotate slowly as a motor somewhere
hummed softly, cutting through the mad roar and rumble of power that
surged through the laboratory.
The glowing light was spinning more swiftly now. A rotating field was
being established. The power beams began to wink, falling and rising in
intensity. The sphere seemed to grow, almost filling the space between
the copper blocks. It touched one and rebounded slightly toward another.
It extended, increased slightly. A terrible screaming ripped through the
room, drowning out the titanic din as the spinning sphere came in
contact with the copper blocks, as force and metal resulted in weird
friction.
With a shocking wrench the beams went dead, the scream cut off, the roar
was gone. A terrifying silence fell upon the room as soon as the
suddenly thunking relays opened automatically.
* * * * *
The sphere was gone! In its place was a tenuous refraction that told
where it had been. That and a thin layer of perfectly reflective
copper ... colorless now, but Manning knew it was copper, for it
represented the continuation of the great copper blocks.
His mind felt as if it were racing in neutral, getting nowhere. Within
that sphere was the total energy that had been poured out by five
gigantic beams, turned on full, for almost a minute's time. Compressed
energy! Energy enough to blast these mountains down to the primal rock
were it released instantly. Energy trapped and held by virtue of some
peculiarity of that little borderline between Force Fields 348 and 349.
Russ walked across the room to a small electric truck with rubber
caterpillar treads, driven by a bank of portable accumulators.
Skillfully the scientist maneuvered it over to the other side of the
room, picked up a steel bar four inches in diameter and five feet long.
Holding it by the handler's magnetic crane, he fixed it firmly in the
armlike jaws on the front of the machine, then moved the machine into a
position straddling the sphere of force.
With smashing momentum the iron jaws thrust downward, driving the steel
bar into the sphere. There was a groaning crash as the handler came to a
halt, shuddering, with only eight inches of the bar buried in the
sphere. The stench of hot insulation filled the room while the electric
motor throbbed, the rubber treads creaked, the machine groaned and
strained, but the bar would go no farther.
Russ shut off the machine and stood back.
"That gives you an idea," he said grimly.
"The trick now," Greg said, "is to break down the field."
Without a word, Russ reached for the power controls. A sudden roar of
thunderous fury and the beams leaped at the sphere ... but this time the
sphere did not materialize again. Again the wrench shuddered through the
laboratory, a wrench that seemed to distort space and time.
Then, as abruptly as it had come, it was gone. But when it ended,
something gigantic and incomprehensibly powerful seemed to rush
soundlessly by ... something that was felt and sensed. It was like a
great noiseless, breathless wind in the dead of night that rushed by
them and through them, all about them in space and died slowly away.
But the vanished steel did not reappear with the disappearance of the
sphere and the draining away of power. Almost grotesquely now, the
handler stood poised above the place where the sphere had been and in
its jaws it held the bar. But the end of the bar, the eight inches that
had been within the sphere, was gone. It had been sliced off so sharply
that it left a highly reflective concave mirror on the severed surface.
"Where is it?" demanded Manning. "In that higher dimension?"
Russ shook his head. "You noticed that rushing sensation? That may have
been the energy of matter rushing into some other space. It may be the
key to the energy of matter!"
Gregory Manning stared at the bar. "I'm staying with you, Russ. I'm
seeing this thing through."
"I knew you would," said Russ.
Triumph flamed briefly in Manning's eyes. "And when we finish, we'll
have something that will break Interplanetary. We'll smash their
stranglehold on the Solar System." He stopped and looked at Page. "Lord,
Russ," he whispered, "do you realize what we'll have?"
"I think I do, Greg," the scientist answered soberly. "Material energy
engines. Power so cheap that you won't be able to give it away. More
power than anybody could ever need."
_CHAPTER THREE_
Russ hunched over the keyboard set in the control room of the _Comet_
and stared down at the keys. The equation was set and ready. All he had
to do was tap that key and they would know, beyond all argument, whether
or not they had dipped into the awful heart of material energy; whether,
finally, they held in their grasp the key to the release of energy that
would give the System power to spare.
His glance lifted from the keyboard, looked out the observation port.
Through the inkiness of space ran a faint blue thread, a tiny line that
stretched from the ship and away until it was lost in the darkness of
the void.
One hundred thousand miles away, that thread touched the surface of a
steel ball bearing ... a speck in the immensity of space.
He thought about that little beam of blue. It took power to do that,
power to hold a beam tight and strong and steady through the stress of
one hundred thousand miles. But it had to be that far away ... and they
had that power. From the bowels of the ship came the deep purr of it,
the angry, silky song of mighty engines throttled down.
He heard Harry Wilson shuffling impatiently behind him, smelled the
acrid smoke that floated from the tip of Wilson's cigarette.
"Might as well punch that key, Russ," said Manning's cool voice. "We
have to find out sooner or later."
Russ's finger hovered over the key, steadied and held. When he punched
that key, if everything worked right, the energy in the tiny ball
bearing would be released instantaneously. The energy of a piece of
steel, weighing less than an ounce. Over that tight beam of blue would
flash the impulse of destruction....
His fingers plunged down.
Space flamed in front of them. For just an instant the void seemed
filled with an angry, bursting fire that lapped with hungry tongues of
cold, blue light toward the distant planets. A flare so intense that it
was visible on the Jovian worlds, three hundred million miles away. It
lighted the night-side of Earth, blotting out the stars and Moon,
sending astronomers scurrying for their telescopes, rating foot-high
streamers in the night editions.
Slowly Russ turned around and faced his friend.
"We have it, Greg," he said. "We really have it. We've tested the
control formulas all along the line. We know what we can do."
"We don't know it all yet," declared Greg. "We know we can make it work,
but I have a feeling we haven't more than skimmed the surface
possibilities."
* * * * *
Russ sank into a chair and stared about the room. They knew they could
generate alternating current of any frequency they chose by use of a
special collector apparatus. They could release radiant energy in almost
any quantity they desired, in any wave-length, from the longest radio to
the incredibly hard cosmics. The electrical power they could measure
accurately and easily by simple voltmeters and ammeters. But radiant
energy was another thing. When it passed all hitherto known bonds, it
would simply fuse any instrument they might use to measure it.
But they knew the power they generated. In one split second they had
burst the energy bonds of a tiny bit of steel and that energy had glared
briefly more hotly than the Sun.
"Greg," he said, "it isn't often you can say that any event was the
beginning of a new era. You can with this--the era of unlimited power.
It kind of scares me."
Up until a hundred years ago coal and oil and oxygen had been the main
power sources, but with the dwindling of the supply of coal and oil, man
had sought another way. He had turned back to the old dream of snatching
power direct from the Sun. In the year 2048 Patterson had perfected the
photo-cell. Then the Alexanderson accumulators made it possible to pump
the life-blood of power to the far reaches of the System, and on Mercury
and Venus, and to a lesser extent on Earth, great accumulator power
plants had sprung up, with Interplanetary, under the driving genius of
Spencer Chambers, gaining control of the market.
The photo-cell and the accumulator had spurred interplanetary trade and
settlement. Until it had been possible to store Sun-power for the
driving of spaceships and for shipment to the outer planets, ships had
been driven by rocket fuel, and the struggling colonies on the outer
worlds had fought a bitter battle without the aid of ready power.
Coal and oil there were in plenty on the outer worlds, but one other
essential was lacking ... oxygen. Coal on Mars, for instance, had to
burned under synthetic air pressures, like the old carburetor. The
result was inefficiency. A lot of coal burned, not enough power
delivered.
Even the photo-cells were inefficient when attempts were made to operate
them beyond the Earth; that was the maximum distance for maximum Solar
efficiency.
Russ dug into the pocket of his faded, scuffed leather jacket and hauled
forth pipe and pouch. Thoughtfully he tamped the tobacco into the bowl.
"Three months," he said. "Three months of damn hard work."
"Yeah," agreed Wilson, "we sure have worked."
Wilson's face was haggard, his eyes red. He blew smoke through his
nostrils.
"When we get back, how about us taking a little vacation?" he asked.
Russ laughed. "You can if you want to. Greg and I are keeping on."
"We can't waste time," Manning said. "Spencer Chambers may get wind of
this. He'd move all hell to stop us."
Wilson spat out his cigarette. "Why don't you patent what you have? That
would protect you."
* * * * *
Russ grinned, but it was a sour one.
"No use," said Greg. "Chambers would tie us up in a mile of legal red
tape. It would be just like walking up and handing it to him."
"You guys go ahead and work," Wilson stated. "I'm taking a vacation.
Three months is too damn long to stay out in a spaceship."
"It doesn't seem long to me," said Greg, his tone cold and sharp.
No, thought Russ, it hadn't seemed long. Perhaps the hours had been
rough, the work hard, but he hadn't noticed. Sleep and food had come in
snatches. For three months they had worked in space, not daring to carry
out their experiments on Earth ... frankly afraid of the thing they had.
He glanced at Manning.
The three months had left no mark upon him, no hint of fatigue or
strain. Russ understood now how Manning had done the things he did. The
man was all steel and flame. Nothing could touch him.
"We still have a lot to do," said Manning.
Russ leaned back and puffed at his pipe.
Yes, there was a lot to do. Transmission problems, for instance. To
conduct away such terrific power as they knew they were capable of
developing would require copper or silver bars as thick as a man's
thigh, and even so at voltages capable of jumping a two-foot spark gap.
Obviously, a small machine such as they now had would be impractical. No
matter how perfectly it might be insulated, the atmosphere itself would
not be an insulator, with power such as this. And if one tried to
deliver the energy as a mechanical rotation of a shaft, what shaft could
transmit it safely and under control?
"Oh, hell," Russ burst out, "let's get back to Earth."
* * * * *
Harry Wilson watched the couple alight from the aero-taxi, walk up the
broad steps and pass through the magic portals of the Martian Club. He
could imagine what the club was like, the deference of the management,
the exotic atmosphere of the dining room, the excellence of the long,
cold drinks served at the bar. Mysterious drinks concocted of
ingredients harvested in the jungles of Venus, spiced with produce from
the irrigated gardens of Mars.
He puffed on the dangling cigarette and shuffled on along the airy
highwalk. Below and above him, all around him flowed the beauty and the
glamor, the bravery and the splendor of New York. The city's song was in
his ears, the surging noises that were its voice.
Two thousand feet above his head reared giant pinnacles of shining
metal, glinting in the noonday sun, architecture that bore the alien
stamp of other worlds.
Wilson turned around, stared at the Martian Club. A man needed money to
pass through those doors, to taste the drinks that slid across its bar,
to sit and watch its floor shows, to hear the music of its orchestras.
For a moment he stood, hesitating, as if he were trying to make up his
mind. He flipped away the cigarette, turned on his heel, walked briskly
to the automatic elevator which would take him to the lower levels.
There, on the third level, he entered a Mecho restaurant, sat down at a
table and ordered from the robot waiter, pushing ivory-tipped buttons on
the menu before him.
He ate leisurely, smoked ferociously, thinking. Looking at his watch, he
saw that it was nearly two o'clock. He walked to the cashier machine,
inserted the metallic check with the correct change and received from
the clicking, chuckling register the disk that would let him out the
door.
"Thank you, come again," the cashier-robot fluted.
"Don't mention it," growled Wilson.
Outside the restaurant he walked briskly. Ten blocks away he came to a
building roofing four square blocks. Over the massive doorway, set into
the beryllium steel, was a map of the Solar System, a map that served as
a cosmic clock, tracing the movement of the planets as they swung in
their long arcs around the Sun. The Solar System was straddled by
glowing, golden letters. They read: INTERPLANETARY BUILDING.
It was from here that Spencer Chambers ruled his empire built on power.
Wilson went inside.
_CHAPTER FOUR_
The new apparatus was set up, a machine that almost filled the
laboratory ... a giant, compact mass of heavy, solidly built metal work,
tied together by beams of girderlike construction. It was meant to stand
up under the hammering of unimaginable power, the stress of unknown
spatial factors.
Slowly, carefully, Russell Page tapped keys on the control board,
setting up an equation. Sucking thoughtfully at his pipe, he checked and
rechecked them.
Harry Wilson regarded him through squinted eyes.
"What the hell is going to happen now?" he asked.
"We'll have to wait and see," Russ answered. "We know what we want to
happen, what we hope will happen, but we never can be sure. We are
working with conditions that are entirely new."
Sitting beside a table littered with papers, staring at the gigantic
machine before him, Gregory Manning said slowly: "That thing simply has
to adapt itself to spaceship drive. There's everything there that's
needed for space propulsion. Unlimited power from a minimum of fuel.
Split-second efficiency. Entire independence of any set condition,
because the stuff creates its own conditions."
He slowly wagged his head.
"The secret is some place along the line," he declared. "I feel that we
must be getting close to it."
Russ walked from the control board to the table, picked up a sheaf of
papers and leafed through them. He selected a handful and shook them in
his fist.
"I thought I had it here," he said. "My math must have been wrong, some
factor that I didn't include in the equation."
"You'll keep finding factors for some time yet," Greg prophesied.
"Repulsion would have been the answer," said Russ bitterly. "And the
Lord knows we have it. Plenty of it."
"Too much," observed Wilson, smoke drooling from his nostrils.
"Not too much," corrected Greg. "Inefficient control. You jump at
conclusions, Wilson."
"The math didn't show that progressive action," said Russ. "It showed
repulsion, negative gravity that could be built up until it would shoot
the ship outside the Solar System within an hour's time. Faster than
light. We don't know how many times faster."
"Forget it," advised Greg. "The way it stands, it's useless. You get
repulsion by progressive steps. A series of squares with one constant
factor. It wouldn't be any good for space travel. Imagine trying to use
it on a spaceship. You'd start with a terrific jolt. The acceleration
would fade and just when you were recovering from the first jolt, you'd
get a second one and that second one would iron you out. A spaceship
couldn't take it, let alone a human body."
* * * * *
"Maybe this will do it," said Wilson hopefully.
"Maybe," agreed Russ. "Anyhow we'll try it. Equation 578."
"It might do the trick," said Greg. "It's a new approach to the gravity
angle. The equation explains the shifting of gravitational lines, the
changing and contortion of their direction. Twist gravity and you have a
perfect space drive. As good as negative gravity. Better, perhaps, more
easily controlled. Would make for more delicate, precise handling."
Russ laid down the sheaf of papers, lit his pipe and walked to the
apparatus.
"Here goes," he said.
His hand went out to the power lever, eased it in. With a roar the
material energy engine built within the apparatus surged into action,
sending a flow of power through the massive leads. The thunder mounted
in the room. The laboratory seemed to shudder with the impact.
Wilson, watching intently, cried out, a brief, choked-off cry. A wave of
dizziness engulfed him. The walls seemed to be falling in. The room and
the machine were blurring. Russ, at the controls, seemed horribly
disjointed. Manning was a caricature of a man, a weird, strange figure
that moved and gestured in the mad room.
Wilson fought against the dizziness. He tried to take a step and the
floor seemed to leap up and meet his outstretched foot, throwing him off
balance. His cigarette fell out of his mouth, rolled along the floor.
Russ was shouting something, but the words were distorted, loud one
instant, rising over the din of the apparatus, a mere whisper the next.
They made no sense.
There was a peculiar whistling in the air, a sound such as he had never
heard before. It seemed to come from far away, a high, thin shriek that
was torture in one's ears.
Giddy, seized with deathly nausea, Wilson clawed his way across the
floor, swung open the laboratory door and stumbled outdoors. He weaved
across the lawn and clung to a sun dial, panting.
He looked back at the laboratory and gasped in disbelief. All the trees
were bent toward the building, as if held by some mighty wind. Their
branches straining, every single leaf standing at rigid attention, the
trees were bending in toward the structure. _But there was no wind._
And then he noticed something else. No matter where the trees stood, no
matter in what direction from the laboratory, they all bent inward
toward the building ... and the whining, thundering, shrieking machine.
Inside the laboratory an empty bottle crashed off a table and smashed
into a thousand fragments. The tinkling of the broken glass was a
silvery, momentary sound that protested against the blasting thrum of
power that shook the walls.
Manning fought along the floor to Russ's side. Russ roared in his ear:
"Gravitational control! Concentration of gravitational lines!"
The papers on the desk started to slide, slithering onto the floor,
danced a crazy dervish across the room. Liquids in the laboratory
bottles were climbing the sides of glass, instead of lying at rest
parallel with the floor. A chair skated, bucking and tipping crazily,
toward the door.
* * * * *
Russ jerked the power lever back to zero. The power hum died. The
liquids slid back to their natural level, the chair tipped over and lay
still, papers fluttered gently downward.
The two men looked at one another across the few feet of floor space
between them. Russ wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead with
his shirt sleeve. He sucked on his pipe, but it was dead.
"Greg," Russ said jubilantly, "we have something better than
anti-gravity! We have something you might call _positive_ gravity ...
gravity that we can control. Your grandfather nullified gravity. We've
gone him one better."
Greg gestured toward the machine. "You created an attraction center.
What else?"
"But the center itself is not actually an attracting force. The fourth
dimension is mixed up in this. We have a sort of fourth-dimensional lens
that concentrates the lines of any gravitational force. Concentration in
the fourth dimension turns the force loose in three dimensions, but we
can take care of that by using mirrors of our anti-entropy. We can
arrange it so that it turns the force loose in only one dimension."
Greg was thoughtful for a moment. "We can guide a ship by a series of
lenses," he declared at last. "But here's the really important thing.
That field concentrates the forces of gravity already present. Those
forces exist throughout all of space. There are gravitational lines
everywhere. We can concentrate them in any direction we want to. In
reality, we fall toward the body which originally caused the force of
gravitation, not to the concentration."
* * * * *
Russ nodded. "That means we can create a field immediately ahead of the
ship. The ship would fall into it constantly, with the concentration
moving on ahead. The field would tend to break down in proportion to the
strain imposed and a big ship, especially when you are building up
speed, would tend to enlarge it, open it up. But the field could be kept
tight by supplying energy and we have plenty of that ... far more than
we'd ever need. We supply the energy, but that's only a small part of
it. The body emitting the gravitational force supplies the fulcrum that
moves us along."
"It would operate beyond the planets," said Greg. "It would operate
equally well anywhere in space, for all of space is filled with
gravitational stress. We could use gravitational bodies many light years
away as the driver of our ships."
A half-wild light glowed momentarily in his eyes.
"Russ," he said, "we're going to put space fields to work at last."
He walked to the chair, picked it up and sat down in it.
"We'll start building a ship," he stated, "just as soon as we know the
mechanics of this gravity concentration and control. Russ, we'll build
the greatest ship, the fastest ship, the most powerful ship the Solar
System has ever known!"
* * * * *
"Damn," said Russ, "that thing's slipped again."
He glared at the offending nut. "I'll put a lock washer on it this
time."
Wilson stepped toward the control board. From his perch on the
apparatus, Russ motioned him away.
"Never mind discharging the field," he said. "I can get around it
somehow."
Wilson squinted at him. "This tooth is near killing me."
"Still got a toothache?" asked Russ.
"Never got a wink of sleep last night."
"You better run down to Frisco and have it yanked out," suggested the
scientist. "Can't have you laid up."
"Yeah, that's right," agreed Wilson. "Maybe I will. We got a lot to do."
Russ reached out and clamped his wrench on the nut, quickly backed it
off and slipped on the washer. Viciously he tightened it home. The
wrench stuck.
Gritting his teeth on the bit of his pipe, Russ cursed soundlessly. He
yanked savagely at the wrench. It slipped from his hand, hung for a
minute on the nut and then plunged downward, falling straight into the
heart of the new force field they had developed.
Russ froze and watched, his heart in his throat, mad thoughts in his
brain. In a flash, as the wrench fell, he remembered that they knew
nothing about this field. All they knew was that any matter introduced
in it suddenly acquired an acceleration in the dimension known as time,
with its normal constant of duration reduced to zero.
When that wrench struck the field, it would cease to exist! But
something else might happen, too, something entirely unguessable.
The wrench fell only a few feet, but it seemed to take long seconds as
Russ watched, frozen in fascination.
He saw it strike the hazy glow that defined the limits of the field, saw
it floating down, as if its speed had been slowed by some dense medium.
In the instant that hazy glow intensified a thousand times--became a
blinding sun-burst! Russ ducked his head, shielded his eyes from the
terrible blast of light. A rending, shuddering thud seemed to echo ...
in space rather than in air ... and both field and wrench were gone!
A moment passed, then another, and there was the heavy, solid clanging
thud of something striking metal. This time the thud was not in space,
but a commonplace noise, as if someone had dropped a tool on the floor
above.
Russ turned around and stared at Wilson. Wilson stared back, his mouth
hanging open, the smoldering, cigarette dangling from his mouth.
"Greg!" Russ shouted, his cry shattering the silence in the laboratory.
A door burst open and Manning stepped into the main laboratory room, a
calculation pad in one hand, a pencil in the other.
"What's the matter?" he demanded.
"We have to find my wrench!"
"Your wrench?" Greg was puzzled. "Can't you get another?"
"I dropped it into the field. Its time-dimension was reduced to zero. It
became an 'instantaneous wrench'."
"Nothing new in that," said Greg, unruffled.
"But there is," persisted Russ. "The field collapsed, you see. Maybe the
wrench was too big for it to handle. And when the field collapsed the
wrench gained a new time-dimension. I heard it. We have to find it."
The three of them pounded up the stairs to the room where Russ had heard
the thump. There was nothing on the floor. They searched the room from
end to end, then the other rooms. There was no wrench.
At the end of an hour Greg went back to the main laboratory, brought
back a portable fluoroscope.
"Maybe this will do the trick," he announced bleakly.
* * * * *
It did. They found the wrench _inside the space between the walls_!
Russ stared at the shadow in the fluoroscope plate. Undeniably it was
the shadow of the wrench.
"Fourth dimension," he said. "Transported in time."
The muscles in Greg's cheeks were tensed, that old flame of excitement
burning in his eyes, but otherwise his face was the mask of old, the
calm, almost terrible mask that had faced a thousand dangers.
"Power and time," he corrected.
"If we can control it," said Russ.
"Don't worry. We can control it. And when we can, it's the biggest thing
we've got."
Wilson licked his lips, dredged a cigarette out of a pocket.
"If you don't mind," he said, "I'll hit for Frisco tonight. This tooth
of mine is getting worse."
"Sure, can't keep an aching tooth," agreed Russ, thinking of the wrench
while talking.
"Can I take your ship?" asked Wilson.
"Sure," said Russ.
Back in the laboratory they rebuilt the field, dropped little ball
bearings in it. The ball bearings disappeared. They found them
everywhere--in the walls, in tables, in the floor. Some, still existing
in their new time-dimension, hung in mid-air, invisible, intangible, but
there.
Hours followed hours, with the sheet of data growing. Math machines
whirred and chuckled and clicked. Wilson departed for San Francisco with
his aching tooth. The other two worked on. By dawn they knew what they
were doing. Out of the chaos of happenstance they were finding rules of
order, certain formulas of behavior, equations of force.
The next day they tried heavier, more complicated things and learned
still more.
A radiogram, phoned from the nearest spaceport, forty miles distant,
informed them that Wilson would not be back for a few days. His tooth
was worse than he had thought, required an operation and treatment of
the jaw.
"Hell," said Russ, "just when he could be so much help."
With Wilson gone the two of them tackled the controlling device, labored
and swore over it. But finally it was completed.
Slumped in chairs, utterly exhausted, they looked proudly at it.
"With that," said Russ, "we can take an object and transport it any
place we want. Not only that, we can pick up any object from an
indefinite distance and bring it to us."
"What a thing for a lazy burglar," Greg observed sourly.
Worn out, they gulped sandwiches and scalding coffee, tumbled into bed.
* * * * *
The outdoor camp meeting was in full swing. The evangelist was in his
top form. The sinners' bench was crowded. Then suddenly, as the
evangelist paused for a moment's silence before he drove home an
important point, the music came. Music from the air. Music from
somewhere in the sky. The soft, heavenly music of a hymn. As if an
angels' chorus were singing in the blue.
The evangelist froze, one arm pointing upward, with index finger ready
to sweep down and emphasize his point. The sinners kneeling at the bench
were petrified. The congregation was astounded.
The hymn rolled on, punctuated, backgrounded by deep celestial organ
notes. The clear voice of the choir swept high to a bell-like note.
"Behold!" shrieked the evangelist. "Behold, a miracle! Angels singing
for us! Kneel! Kneel and pray!"
Nobody stood.
* * * * *
Andy McIntyre was drunk again. In the piteous glare of mid-morning, he
staggered homeward from the poker party in the back of Steve Abram's
harness shop. The light revealed him to the scorn of the entire village.
At the corner of Elm and Third he ran into a maple tree. Uncertainly he
backed away, intent on making another try. Suddenly the tree spoke to
him:
"Alcohol is the scourge of mankind. It turns men into beasts. It robs
them of their brains, it shortens their lives ..."
Andy stared, unable to believe what he heard. The tree, he had no doubt,
was talking to him personally.
The voice of the tree went on: "... takes the bread out of the mouths of
women and children. Fosters crime. Weakens the moral fiber of the
nation."
"Stop!" screamed Andy. "Stop, I tell you!"
The tree stopped talking. All he could hear was the whisper of wind
among its autumn-tinted leaves.
Suddenly running, Andy darted around the corner, headed home.
"Begad," he told himself, "when trees start talkin' to you it's time to
lay off the bottle!"
* * * * *
In another town fifty miles distant from the one in which the tree had
talked to Andy McIntyre, another miracle happened that same Sunday
morning.
Dozens of people heard the bronze statue of the soldier in the courtyard
speak. The statue did not come to life. It stood as ever, a solid piece
of golden bronze, in spots turned black and green by weather. But from
its lips came words ... words that burned themselves into the souls of
those who heard. Words that exhorted them to defend the principles for
which many men had died, to grasp and hold high the torch of democracy
and liberty.
In somber bitterness, the statue called Spencer Chambers the greatest
threat to that liberty and freedom. For, the statue said, Spencer
Chambers and Interplanetary Power were waging an economic war, a
bloodless one, but just as truly war as if there were cannons firing and
bombs exploding.
For a full five minutes the statue spoke and the crowd, growing by the
minute, stood dumbfounded.
Then silence fell over the courtyard. The statue stood as before,
unmoving, its timeless eyes staring out from under the ugly helmet, its
hands gripping the bayoneted rifle. A blue and white pigeon fluttered
softly down, alighted on the bayonet, looked the crowd over and then
flew to the courthouse tower.
* * * * *
Back in the laboratory, Russ looked at Greg.
"That radio trick gives me an idea," he said. "If we can put a radio in
statues and trees without interfering with its operation, why can't we
do the same thing with a television set?"
Greg started. "Think of the possibilities of that!" he burst out.
Within an hour a complete television sending apparatus was placed within
the field and a receptor screen set up in the laboratory.
The two moved chairs in front of the screen and sat down. Russ reached
out and pulled the switch of the field control. The screen came to life,
but it was only a gray blur.
"It's traveling too fast," said Greg. "Slow it down."
Russ retarded the lever. "When that thing's on full, it's almost
instantaneous. It travels in a time dimension and any speed slower than
instantaneity is a modification of that force field."
On the screen swam a panorama of the mountains, mile after mile of
snow-capped peaks and valleys ablaze with the flames of autumn foliage.
The mountains faded away. There was desert now and then a city. Russ
dropped the televisor set lower, down into a street. For half an hour
they sat comfortably in their chairs and watched men and women walking,
witnessed one dog fight, cruised slowly up and down, looking into
windows of homes, window-shopping in the business section.
"There's just one thing wrong," said Greg. "We can see everything, but
we can't hear a sound."
"We can fix that," Russ told him.
He lifted the televisor set from the streets, brought it back across the
desert and mountains into the laboratory.
"We have two practical applications now," said Greg. "Space drive and
television spying. I don't know which is the best. Do you realize that
with this television trick there isn't a thing that can be hidden from
us?"
"I believe we can go to Mars or Mercury or anywhere we want to with this
thing. It doesn't seem to have any particular limits. It handles
perfectly. You can move it a fraction of an inch as easily as a hundred
miles. And it's fast. Almost instantaneous. Not quite, for even with
our acceleration within time, there is a slight lag."
By evening they had an audio apparatus incorporated in the set, had
wired the screen for sound.
"Let's put this to practical use," suggested Greg. "There's a show at
the New Mercury Theater in New York I've been wanting to see. Let's
knock off work and take in that show."
"Now," said Russ, "you really have an idea. The ticket scalpers are
charging a fortune, and it won't cost us a cent to get in!"
_CHAPTER FIVE_
Pine roots burned brightly in the fireplace, snapping and sizzling as
the blaze caught and flamed on the resin. Deep in an easy chair, Greg
Manning stretched his long legs out toward the fire and lifted his
glass, squinting at the flames through the amber drink.
"There's something that's been worrying me a little," he said. "I hadn't
told you about it because I figured it wasn't as serious as it looked.
Maybe it isn't, but it looks funny."
"What's that?" asked Russ.
"The stock market," replied Greg. "There's something devilish funny
going on there. I've lost about a billion dollars in the last two
weeks."
"A _billion_ dollars?" gasped Russ.
Greg swirled the whiskey in his glass. "Don't sound so horrified. The
loss is all on paper. My stocks have gone down. Most of them cut in
half. Some even less than that. Martian Irrigation is down to 75. I paid
185 for it. It's worth 200."
"You mean something has happened to the market?"
"Not to the market. If that was it, I wouldn't worry. I've seen the
market go up and down. That's nothing to worry about. But the market,
except for a slight depression, has behaved normally in these past two
weeks. It almost looks as if somebody was out to get me."
"Who'd want to and why?"
Greg sighed. "I wish I knew. I haven't really lost a cent, of course. My
shares can't stay down for very long. The thing is that right now I
can't sell them even for what I paid for them. If I sold now I'd lose
that billion. But as long as I don't have to sell, the loss is merely on
paper."
He sipped at the drink and stared into the fire.
"If you don't have to, what are you worrying about?" asked Russ.
"Couple of things. I put that stock up as collateral to get the cash to
build the spaceship. At present prices, it will take more securities
than I thought. If the prices continue to go down, I'll have the bulk of
my holdings tied up in the spaceship. I might even be forced to
liquidate some of it and that would mean an actual loss."
He hunched forward in the chair, stared at Russ.
"Another thing," he said grimly, "is that I hate the idea of somebody
singling me out as a target. As if they were going to make a financial
example of me."
"And it sounds as if someone has," agreed Russ.
Greg leaned back again, drained his glass and set it down.
"It certainly does," he said.
Outside, seen through the window beside the fireplace, the harvest moon
was a shield of silver hung in the velvet of the sky. A lonesome wind
moaned in the pines and under the eaves.
"I got a report from Belgium the other day," said Greg. "The spaceship
is coming along. It'll be the biggest thing afloat in space."
"The biggest and the toughest," said Russ, and Greg nodded silent
agreement.
The ship itself was being manufactured at the great Space Works in
Belgium, but other parts of it, apparatus, engines, gadgets of every
description, were being manufactured at other widely scattered points.
Anyone wondering what kind of ship the finished product would be would
have a hard time gathering the correct information, which, of course,
was the idea. The "anyone" they were guarding against was Spencer
Chambers.
* * * * *
"We need a better television set," said Russ. "This one we have is all
right, but we need the best there is. I wonder if Wilson could get us
one in Frisco and bring it back."
"I don't see why not," said Greg. "Send him a radio."
Russ stepped to the phone, called the spaceport and filed the message.
"He always stays at the Greater Martian," he told Greg. "We'll probably
catch him there."
* * * * *
Two hours later the phone rang. It was the spaceport.
"That message you sent to Wilson," said the voice of the operator,
"can't be delivered. Wilson isn't at the Greater Martian. The clerk said
he checked out for New York last night."
"Didn't he leave a forwarding address?" asked Russ.
"Apparently not."
Russ hung up the receiver, frowning. "Wilson is in New York."
Greg looked up from a sheet of calculations.
"New York, eh?" he said and then went back to work, but a moment later
he straightened from his work. "What would Wilson be doing in New York?"
"I wonder ..." Russ stopped and shook his head.
"Exactly," said Greg. He glanced out of the window, considering, the
muscles in his cheeks knotting. "Russ, we both are thinking the same
thing."
"I hate to think it," said Russ evenly. "I hate to think such a thing
about a man."
"One way to find out," declared Greg. He rose from the chair and walked
to the television control board, snapped the switch. Russ took a chair
beside him. On the screen the mountains danced weirdly as the set
rocketed swiftly away and then came the glint of red and yellow desert.
Blackness blanked out the screen as the set plunged into the ground,
passing through the curvature of the Earth's surface. The blackness
passed and fields and farms were beneath them on the screen, a green and
brown checkerboard with tiny white lines that were roads.
New York was in the screen now. Greg's hand moved the control and the
city rushed up at them, the spires speeding toward them like plunging
spears. Down into the canyons plunged the set, down into the financial
district with its beetling buildings that hemmed in the roaring traffic.
Grimly, surely, Greg drove his strange machine through New York. Through
buildings, through shimmering planes, through men. Like an arrow the
television set sped to its mark and then Greg's hand snapped back the
lever and in the screen was a building that covered four whole blocks.
Above the entrance was the famous Solar System map and straddling the
map were the gleaming golden letters: INTERPLANETARY BUILDING.
"Now we'll see," said Greg.
He heard the whistle of the breath in Russ's nostrils as the television
set began to move, saw the tight grip Russ had upon the chair arms.
The interior of the building showed on the screen as he drove the set
through steel and stone, offices and corridors and brief glimpses of
steel partitions, until it came to a door marked: SPENCER CHAMBERS,
PRESIDENT.
Greg's hand twisted the control slightly and the set went through the
door, into the office of Spencer Chambers.
Four men were in the room--Chambers himself; Craven, the scientist;
Arnold Grant, head of Interplanetary's publicity department, _and Harry
Wilson_!
Wilson's voice came out of the screen, a frantic, almost terrified
voice.
"I've told you all I know. I'm not a scientist. I'm a mechanic. I've
told you what they're doing. I can't tell you how they do it."
Arnold Grant leaned forward in his chair. His face was twisted in fury.
"There were plans, weren't there?" he demanded. "There were equations
and formulas. Why didn't you bring us some of them?"
Spencer Chambers raised a hand from the desk, waved it toward Grant.
"The man has told us all he knows. Obviously, he can't be any more help
to us."
"You told him to go back and see if he couldn't find something else,
didn't you?" asked Grant.
"Yes, I did," Chambers told him. "But apparently he couldn't find it."
"I tried," pleaded Wilson. Perspiration stood out on his forehead. The
cigarette in his mouth was limp and dead. "One of them was always there.
I never could get hold of any papers. I asked questions, but they were
too busy to answer. And I couldn't ask too much, because then they would
have suspected me."
"No, you couldn't do that," commented Craven with an open sneer.
* * * * *
In the laboratory Russ pounded the arm of his chair with a clenched
fist. "The rat sold us out!"
Greg said nothing, but his face was stony and his eyes were
crystal-hard.
On the screen Chambers was speaking to Wilson. "Do you think you could
find something out if you went back again?"
Wilson squirmed in his chair.
"I'd rather not." His voice sounded like a whimper. "I'm afraid they
suspect me now. I'm afraid of what they'd do if they found out."
"That's his conscience," breathed Russ in the laboratory. "I never
suspected him."
"He's right about one thing, though," Greg said. "He'd better not come
back."
Chambers was talking again: "You realize, of course, that you haven't
been much help to us. You have only warned us that another kind of power
generation is being developed. You've set us on our guard, but other
than that we're no better off than we were before."
Wilson bristled, like a cowardly animal backed into a corner. "I told
you what was going on. You can be ready for it now. I can't help it if I
couldn't find out how all them things worked."
"Look here," said Chambers. "I made a bargain with you and I keep my
bargains. I told you I would pay you twenty thousand dollars for the
information you gave me when you first came to see me. I told you I'd
pay you for any further additional information you might give. Also I
promised you a job with the company."
Watching the financier, Wilson licked his lips. "That's right," he said.
Chambers reached out and pulled a checkbook toward him, lifted a pen
from its holder. "I'm paying you the twenty thousand for the warning.
I'm not paying you a dime more, because you gave me no other
information."
Wilson leaped to his feet, started to protest.
"Sit down," said Chambers coldly.
"But the job! You said you'd give me a job!"
Chambers shook his head. "I wouldn't have a man like you in my
organization. If you were a traitor to one man, you would be to
another."
"But ... but ..." Wilson started to object and then sat down, his face
twisted in something that came very close to fear.
Chambers ripped the check out of the book, waved it slowly in the air to
dry it. Then he arose and held it out to Wilson, who reached out a
trembling hand and took it.
"And now," said Chambers, "good day, Mr. Wilson."
For a moment Wilson stood uncertain, as if he intended to speak, but
finally he turned, without a word, and walked through the door.
* * * * *
In the laboratory Russ and Greg looked at one another.
"Twenty thousand," said Greg. "Why, that was worth millions."
"It was worth everything Chambers had," said Russ, "because it's the
thing that's going to wreck him."
Their attention snapped back to the screen.
Chambers was hunched over his desk, addressing the other two.
"Now, gentlemen," he asked, "what are we to do?"
Craven shrugged his shoulders. There was a puzzled frown in the eyes
back of the thick-lensed glasses. "We haven't much to go on. Wilson
doesn't know a thing about it. He hasn't the brain to grasp even the
most fundamental ideas back of the whole thing."
Chambers nodded. "The man knew the mechanical setup perfectly, but that
was all."
"I've constructed the apparatus," said Craven. "It's astoundingly
simple. Almost too simple to do the things Wilson said it would do. He
drew plans for it, so clear that it was easy to duplicate the apparatus.
He himself checked the machine and says it is the same as Page and
Manning have. But there are thousands of possible combinations for
hookups and control board settings. Too many to try to go through and
hit upon the right answer. Because, you see, one slight adjustment in
any one of a hundred adjustments might do the trick ... but which of
those adjustments do you have to make? We have to have the formulas, the
equations, before we can even move."
"He seemed to remember a few things," said Grant hopefully. "Certain
rules and formulas."
Craven flipped both his hands angrily. "Worse than nothing," he
exploded. "What Page and Manning have done is so far in advance of
anything that anyone else has even thought about that we are completely
at sea. They're working with space fields, apparently, and we haven't
even scratched the surface in that branch of investigation. We simply
haven't got a thing to go on."
* * * * *
"No chance at all?" asked Chambers.
Craven shook his head slowly.
"At least you could try," snapped Grant.
"Now, wait," Chambers snapped back. "You seem to forget Dr. Craven is
one of the best scientists in the world today. I'm relying on him."
Craven smiled. "I can't do anything with what Page and Manning have, but
I might try something of my own."
"By all means do so," urged Chambers. He turned to Grant. "I observed
you have carried out the plans we laid. Martian Irrigation hit a new low
today."
Grant grinned. "It was easy. Just a hint here and there to the right
people."
Chambers looked down at his hands, slowly closing into fists. "We have
to stop them some way, any way at all. Keep up the rumors. We'll make
it impossible for Greg Manning to finance this new invention. We'll take
away every last dollar he has."
He glared at the publicity man. "You understand?"
"Yes, sir," said Grant, "I understand perfectly."
"All right," said Chambers. "And your job, Craven, is to either develop
what Page has found or find something we can use in competition."
Craven growled angrily. "What happens if your damn rumors can't ruin
Manning? What if I can't find anything?"
"In that case," said Chambers, "there are other ways."
"Other ways?"
Chambers suddenly smiled at them. "I have a notion to call Stutsman back
to Earth."
Craven drummed his fingers idly on the arm of his chair. "Yes, I guess
you do have other ways," he said.
* * * * *
Greg's hand snapped the switch and the screen suddenly was blank as the
televisor set returned instantly to the laboratory.
"That explains a lot of things," he said. "Among them what has happened
to my stocks."
Russ sat in his chair, numbed. "That little weak-kneed, ratting traitor,
Wilson. He'd sell his mother for a new ten-dollar bill."
"We know," said Greg, "and Chambers doesn't know we know. We'll follow
every move he makes. We'll know every one of his plans."
Pacing up and down the room, he was already planning their campaign.
"There are still a few things to do," he added. "A few possibilities we
may have overlooked."
"But will we have time?" asked Russ.
"I think so. Chambers is going to go slow. The gamble is too big to risk
any slip. He doesn't want to get in bad with the law. There won't be any
strong-arm stuff ... not until he recalls Stutsman from Callisto."
He paused in mid-stride, stood planted solidly on the floor.
"When Stutsman gets into the game," he said, "all hell will break
loose."
He took a deep breath.
"But we'll be ready for it then!"
_CHAPTER SIX_
"If we can get television reception with this apparatus of ours," asked
Greg, "what is to prevent us from televising? Why can't we send as well
as receive?"
Russ drew doodles on a calculation sheet. "We could. Just something else
to work out. You must remember we're working in a four-dimensional
medium. That would complicate matters a little. Not like working in
three dimensions alone. It would ..."
He stopped. The pencil fell from his finger and he swung around slowly
to face Manning.
"What's the matter now?" asked Greg.
"Look," said Russ excitedly. "We're working in four dimensions. And if
we televised through four dimensions, what would we get?"
Greg wrinkled his brow. Suddenly his face relaxed. "You don't mean we
can televise in _three_ dimensions, do you?"
"That's what it should work out to," declared Russ. He swung back to the
table again, picked up his pencil and jotted down equations. He looked
up from the sheet. "Three-dimensional television!" he almost whispered.
"Something new again," commented Greg.
"I'll say it's new!"
Russ reached out and jerked a calculator toward him. Rapidly he set up
the equations, pressed the tabulator lever. The machine gurgled and
chuckled, clicked out the result. Bending over to read it, Russ sucked
in his breath.
"It's working out right," he said.
"That'll mean new equipment, lots of it," Greg pointed out. "Wilson's
gone, damn him. Who's going to help us?"
"We'll do it ourselves," said Russ. "When we're the only ones here, we
can be sure there won't be any leak."
It took hours of work on the math machines, but at the end of that time
Russ was certain of his ground.
"Now we go to work," he said, gleefully.
In a week's time they had built a triple televisor, but simplifications
of the standard commercial set gave them a mechanism that weighed little
more and was far more efficient and accurate.
During the time the work went on they maintained a watch over both the
office of Spencer Chambers and the laboratory in which Dr. Herbert
Craven worked 16 hours a day. Unseen, unsuspected, they were silent
companions of the two men during many hours. They read what the men
wrote, read what was written to them, heard what they said, saw how they
acted. Doing so, the pair in the high mountain laboratory gained a deep
insight into the characters of unsuspecting quarries.
"Both utterly ruthless," declared Greg. "But apparently men who are
sincere in thinking that the spoils belong to the strong. Strange,
almost outdated men. You can't help but like Chambers. He's good enough
at heart. He has his pet charities. He really, I believe, wants to help
the people. And I think he actually believes the best way to do it is to
gain a dictatorship over the Solar System. That ambition rules
everything in his life. It has hardened him and strengthened him. He
will crush ruthlessly, without a single qualm, anything that stands in
his path. That's why we'll have a fight on our hands."
* * * * *
Craven seemed to be making little progress. They could only guess at
what he was trying to develop.
"I think," said Russ, "he's working on a collector field to suck in
radiant energy. If he really gets that, it will be something worth
having."
For hours Craven sat, an intent, untidy, unkempt man, sunk deep in the
cushions of an easy chair. His face was calm, with relaxed jaw and eyes
that seemed vacant. But each time he would rouse himself from the chair
to pencil new notations on the pads of paper that littered his desk. New
ideas, new approaches.
The triple televisor was completed except for one thing.
"Sound isn't so easy," said Russ. "If we could only find a way to
transmit it as well as light."
"Listen," said Greg, "why don't you try a condenser speaker."
"A condenser speaker?"
"Sure, the gadget developed way back in the 1920s. It hasn't been used
for years to my knowledge, but it might do the trick."
Russ grinned broadly. "Hell, why didn't I think of that? Here I've been
racking my brain for a new approach, a new wrinkle ... and exactly what
I wanted was at hand."
"Should work," declared Greg. "Just the opposite of a condenser
microphone. Instead of radiating sound waves mechanically, it radiates a
changing electric field and this field becomes audible directly within
the ear. Even yet no one seems to understand just how it works, but it
does ... and that's good enough."
"I know," said Russ. "It really makes no sound. In other words it
creates an electric field that doubles for sound. It ought to be just
the thing because nothing can stop it. Metal shielding can, I guess, if
it's thick enough, but it's got to be pretty damn thick."
It took time to set the mechanism up. Ready, the massive apparatus,
within which glowed a larger and more powerful force field, was operated
by two monstrous material energy engines. The controls were equipped
with clockwork drives, designed so that the motion of the Earth could be
nullified completely and automatically for work upon outlying planets.
* * * * *
Russ stood back and looked at it. "Stand in front of that screen, Greg,"
he said, "and we'll try it on you."
Greg stepped in front of the screen. The purr of power came on.
Suddenly, materializing out of the air, came Greg's projection. Hazy and
undefined at first, it rapidly assumed apparent solidity. Greg waved his
arm; the image moved its arm.
Russ left the controls and walked across the laboratory to inspect the
image. Examined from all sides, it looked solid. Russ walked through
it and felt nothing. There was nothing there. It was just a
three-dimensional image. But even from two feet away, it was as if the
man himself stood there in all the actuality of flesh and blood.
"Hello, Russ," the image whispered. It held out a hand. "Glad to see you
again."
Laughing, Russ thrust out his hand. It closed on nothing in mid-air, but
the two men appeared to shake hands.
They tested the machine that afternoon. Their images strode above the
trees, apparently walking on thin air. Gigantic replicas of Greg stood
on a faraway mountain top and shouted with a thunderous voice. Smaller
images, no more than two inches high, shinnied up a table leg.
Satisfied, they shut off the machine.
"That's one of the possibilities you mentioned," suggested Russ.
Greg nodded grimly.
* * * * *
An autumn gale pelted the windows with driving rain, and a wild, wet
wind howled through the pines outside. The fire was leaping and flaring
in the fireplace.
Deep in his chair, Russ stared into the flame and puffed at his pipe.
"The factory wants more money on the spaceship," said Greg from the
other chair. "I had to put up some more shares as collateral on a new
loan."
"Market still going down?" asked Russ.
"Not the market," replied Greg. "My stocks. All of them hit new lows
today."
Russ dragged at the pipe thoughtfully. "I've been thinking about that
stock business, Greg."
"So have I, but it doesn't seem to do much good."
"Look," said Russ slowly, "what planets have exchanges?"
"All of them except Mercury. The Jovian exchange is at Ranthoor. There's
even one out at Pluto. Just mining and chemical shares listed, though."
Russ did not reply. Smoke curled up from his pipe. He was staring into
the fire.
"Why do you ask?" Greg wanted to know.
"Just something stirring around in my mind. I was wondering where
Chambers does most of his trading."
"Ranthoor now," said Greg. "Used to do it on Venus. The listing is
larger there. But since he took over the Jovian confederacy, he switched
his business to it. The transaction tax is lower. He saw to that."
"And the same shares are listed on the Callisto market as on the New
York boards?"
"Naturally," said Greg, "only not as many."
Russ watched the smoke from his pipe. "How long does it take light to
travel from Callisto to Earth?"
"Why, about 45 minutes, I guess. Somewhere around there." Greg sat
upright. "Say, what's light got to do with this?"
"A lot," said Russ. "All commerce is based on the assumption that light
is instantaneous, but it isn't. All business, anywhere throughout the
Solar System, is based on Greenwich time. When a noon signal sent out
from Earth reaches Mars, it's noon there, but as a matter of fact, it is
actually 15 minutes or so past noon. When the same signal reaches
Callisto, the correct time for the chronometer used in commerce would be
noon when it is really a quarter to one. That system simplifies things.
Does away with varying times. And it has worked all right so far because
there has been, up to now, nothing that could go faster than light. No
news can travel through space, no message, no signal can be sent at any
speed greater than that. So everything has been fine."
Greg had come out of the chair, was standing on his feet, the glow of
the blaze throwing his athletic figure into bold relief. That calm
exterior had been stripped from him now. He was excited.
"I see what you are getting at! We have something that is almost
instantaneous!"
"Almost," said Russ. "Not quite. There's a time lag somewhere. But it
isn't noticeable except over vast distances."
"But it would beat ordinary light signals to Callisto. It would beat
them there by almost 45 minutes."
"Almost," Russ agreed. "Maybe a split second less."
Greg strode up and down in front of the fireplace like a caged lion. "By
heaven," he said, "we've got Chambers where we want him. We can beat the
stock quotations to Callisto. With that advance knowledge of what the
board is doing in New York, we can make back every dime I've lost. We
can take Mr. Chambers to the cleaners!"
Russ grinned. "Exactly," he said. "We'll know 45 minutes in advance of
the other traders what the market will be. Let's see Chambers beat
that."
_CHAPTER SEVEN_
Ben Wrail was taking things easy. Stretched out in his chair, with his
cigar lit and burning satisfactorily, he listened to a radio program
broadcast from Earth.
Through the window beside him, he could look out of his skyscraper
apartment over the domed city of Ranthoor. Looming in the sky, slightly
distorted by the heavy quartz of the distant dome, was massive Jupiter,
a scarlet ball tinged with orange and yellow. Overwhelmingly luminous,
monstrously large, it filled a large portion of the visible sky, a sight
that brought millions of tourists to the Jovian moons each year, a sight
that even the old-timers still must stare at, drawn by some unfathomable
fascination.
Ben Wrail stared at it now, puffing at his cigar, listening to the
radio. An awe-inspiring thing, a looming planet that seemed almost ready
to topple and crash upon this airless, frigid world.
Wrail was an old-timer. For thirty years--Earth years--he had made his
home in Ranthoor. He had seen the city grow from a dinky little mining
camp enclosed by a small dome to one that boasted half a million
population. The dome that now covered the city was the fourth one. Four
times, like the nautilus, the city had outgrown its shell, until today
it was the greatest domed city in the Solar System. Where life had once
been cheap and where the scum of the system had held rendezvous, he had
seen Ranthoor grow into a city of dignity, capital of the Jovian
confederacy.
He had helped build that confederacy, had been elected a member of the
constitution commission, had helped create the government and for over a
decade had helped to make its laws.
But now ... Ben Wrail spat angrily and stuffed the cigar back in his
mouth again, taking a fresh and fearsome grip. Now everything had
changed. The Jovian worlds today were held in bond by Spencer Chambers.
The government was in the hands of his henchmen. Duly elected, of
course, but in an election held under the unspoken threat that
Interplanetary Power would withdraw, leaving the moons circling the
great planet without heat, air, energy. For the worlds of the Jovian
confederacy, every single one of them, depended for their life upon the
accumulators freighted outward from the Sun.
Talk of revolt was in the air, but, lacking a leader, it would get
nowhere. John Moore Mallory was imprisoned on one of the prison
spaceships that plied through the Solar System. Mallory, months ago, had
been secretly transferred from the Callisto prison to the spaceship, but
in a week's time the secret had been spread in angry whispers. If there
had been riots and bloodshed, they would have been to no purpose. For
revolution, even if successful, would gain nothing. It would merely goad
Interplanetary Power into withdrawing, refusing to service the domed
cities on the moons.
* * * * *
Ben Wrail stirred restlessly in his chair. The cigar had gone out. The
radio program blared unheard. His eyes still looked out the window
without seeing Jupiter.
"Damn," said Ben Wrail. Why did he have to go and spoil an evening
thinking about this damned political situation? Despite his part in the
building of the confederacy, he was a businessman, not a politician.
Still, it hurt to see something torn down that he had helped to build,
though he knew that every pioneering strike in history had been taken
over by shrewd, ruthless, powerful operators. Knowing that should have
helped, but it didn't. He and the other Jovian pioneers had hoped it
wouldn't happen and, of course, it had.
"Ben Wrail," said a voice in the room.
Wrail swung around, away from the window.
"Manning!" he yelled, and the man in the center of the room grinned
bleakly at him. "How did you come in without me hearing you? When did
you get here?"
"I'm not here," said Greg. "I'm back on Earth."
"You're what?" asked Wrail blankly. "That's a pretty silly statement,
isn't it, Manning? Or did you decide to loosen up and pull a gag now and
then?"
"I mean it," said Manning. "This is just an image of me. My body is back
on Earth."
"You mean you're dead? You're a ghost?"
The grin widened, but the face was bleak as ever.
"No, Ben, I'm just alive as you are. Let me explain. This is a
television image of me. Three-dimensional television. I can travel
anywhere like this."
Wrail sat down in the chair again. "I don't suppose there'd be any use
trying to shake hands with you."
"No use," agreed Manning's image. "There isn't any hand."
"Nor asking you to have a chair?"
Manning shook his head.
"Anyhow," said Wrail, "I'm damn glad to see you--or think I see you. I
don't know which. Figure you can stay and talk with me a while?"
* * * * *
"Certainly," said Manning. "That is what I came for. I want to ask your
help."
"Listen," declared Wrail, "you can't be on Earth, Manning. I say
something to you and you answer right back. That isn't possible. You
can't hear anything I say until 45 minutes after I say it, and then I'd
have to wait another 45 minutes to hear your answer."
"That's right," agreed the image, "if you insist upon talking about the
velocity of light. We have something better than that."
"We?"
"Russell Page and myself. We have a two-way television apparatus that
works almost instantaneously. To all purposes, so far as the distance
between Earth and Callisto is concerned, it is instantaneous."
Wrail's jaw fell. "Well, I be damned. What have you two fellows been up
to now?"
"A lot," said Manning laconically. "For one thing we are out to bust
Interplanetary Power. Bust them wide open. Hear that, Wrail?"
Wrail stared in stupefaction. "Sure, I hear. But I can't believe it."
"All right then," said Manning grimly, "we'll give you proof. What
could you do, Ben, if we told you what was happening on the stock market
in New York ... _without you having to wait the 45 minutes it takes the
quotations to get here_?"
Wrail sprang to his feet. "What could I do? Why, I could run the pants
off every trader in the exchange! I could make a billion a minute!" He
stopped and looked at the image. "But this isn't like you. This isn't
the way you'd do things."
"I don't want you to hurt anyone but Chambers," said Manning. "If
somebody else gets in the way, of course they have to take the rap along
with him. But I do want to give Chambers a licking. That's what I came
here to see you about."
"By Heaven, Greg, I'll do it," said Wrail. He stepped quickly forward,
held out his hand to close the deal, and encountered only air.
Manning's image threw back its head and laughed.
"That's your proof, Ben. Good enough?"
"I'll say it is," said Wrail shakily, looking down at the solid-seeming
hand that his own had gone right through.
* * * * *
November 6, 2153, was a day long remembered in financial circles
throughout the Solar System. The Ranthoor market opened easy with little
activity. Then a few stocks made fractional gains. Mining dropped
fractionally. Martian Irrigation still was unexplainably low, as was
Pluto Chemical and Asteroid Mining.
Trading through two brokers, Ben Wrail bought 10,000 shares of Venus
Farms, Inc. when the market opened at 83-1/2. A few minutes later they
bought 10,000 shares of Spacesuits Ltd. at 106-1/4. The farm stocks
dropped off a point. Spacesuits gained a point. Then suddenly both rose.
In the second hour of trading the Venus stocks had boomed a full five
points and Wrail sold. Ten minutes later they sagged. At the end of the
day they were off two points from the opening. In late afternoon Wrail
threw his 10,000 shares of Spacesuits on the market, sold them at an
even 110. Before the close they had dropped back with a gain of only
half a point over the opening.
Those were only two transactions. There were others. Spaceship
Fabrication climbed three points before it fell and Wrail cashed in on
that. Mercury Metals rose two points and crashed back to close with a
full point loss. Wrail sold just before the break. He had realized a
cool half million in the day's trade.
The next day it was a million and then the man who had always been a
safe trader, who had always played the conservative side of the market,
apparently sure of his ground now, plunged deeper and deeper. It was
uncanny. Wrail knew when to buy and when to sell. Other traders watched
closely, followed his lead. He threw them off by using different brokers
to disguise his transactions.
Hectic day followed hectic day. Ben Wrail did not appear on the floor.
Calls to his office netted exactly nothing. Mr. Wrail was not in. So
sorry.
His brokers, well paid, were close-mouthed. They bought and sold. That
was all.
Seated in his office, Ben Wrail was busy watching two television screens
before him. One showed the board in the New York exchange. In the other
was the image of Gregory Manning, hunched in a chair in Page's mountain
laboratory back on Earth. And before Greg likewise were two screens, one
showing the New York exchange board, the other trained on Ben Wrail's
office.
"That Tourist stuff looks good," said Greg. "Why not buy a block of it?
I happen to know that Chambers owns a few shares. He'll be dabbling in
it."
Ben Wrail grinned. "It's made a couple of points, hasn't it? It's
selling here for 60 right now. In 45 minutes it'll be quoted at 62."
He picked up a telephone. "Buy all you can of Tourist," he said. "Right
away. I'll tell you when to sell. Get rid of whatever you have in Titan
Copper at 10:30."
"Better let go of your holdings of Ranthoor Dome," suggested Greg. "It's
beginning to slip."
"I'll watch it," promised Ben. "It may revive."
They lapsed into silence, watching the board in New York.
"You know, Greg," said Ben finally, "I really didn't believe all this
was true until I saw those credit certificates materialize on my desk."
"Simple," grunted Greg. "This thing we've got can take anything any
place. I could reach out there, grab you up and have you down here in a
split second."
Ben sucked his breath in between his teeth. "I'm not doubting anything
any more. You sent me half a billion two days ago. It's more than
doubled now."
He picked up the phone again and spoke to his broker on the other end.
"Unload Ranthoor Dome when she reaches 79."
* * * * *
The real furor came on the Ranthoor floor when Wrail cornered Titan
Copper. Striking swiftly, he purchased the stock in huge blocks. The
shares rocketed as the exchanges throughout the System were thrown into
an uproar. Under the cover of the excitement he proceeded to corner
Spacesuits Ltd. Spacesuits zoomed.
For two days the main exchanges on four worlds were in a frenzy as
traders watched the shares climb swiftly. Operators representing
Interplanetary Power made offerings. No takers were reported. The shares
climbed.
Within one hour, however, the entire Wrail holdings in both stocks were
dumped on the market. The Interplanetary Power traders, frantic over the
prospect of losing control of the two important issues, bought heavily.
The price plummeted.
Spencer Chambers lost three billion or more on the deal. Overnight Ben
Wrail had become a billionaire many times over. Greg Manning added to
his own fortune.
"We have enough," said Greg. "We've given Chambers what he had coming to
him. Let's call it off."
"Glad to," agreed Ben. "It was just too damned easy."
"Be seeing you, Ben."
"I'll get down to Earth some day. Come see me when you have a minute.
Drop in for an evening."
"That's an invitation," said Greg. "It's easy with this three-dimension
stuff."
He reached out a hand, snapped a control. The screens in Wrail's office
went dead.
Wrail reached for a cigar, lit it carefully. He leaned back in his
chair, put his feet on the desk.
"By Heaven," he said satisfiedly, "I've never enjoyed anything so much
in all my life."
_CHAPTER EIGHT_
A giant cylindrical hull of finest beryl steel, the ship loomed in the
screen. A mighty ship, braced into absolute rigidity by monster cross
beams of shining steel. Glowing under the blazing lamps that lighted the
scene, it towered into the shadows of the factory, dwarfing the
scurrying workmen who swarmed over it.
"She's a beauty," said Russ, puffing at his pipe.
Greg nodded agreement. "They're working on her day and night to get her
finished. We may need it some day and need it in a hurry. If Chambers
really gets that machine of his to rolling, space will be the only place
big enough to hide in."
He chuckled, a grim chuckle, deep in his throat.
"But we won't have to hide long. Just until we get organized and then
will come the time when we'll call for the showdown. Chambers will have
to spread his cards."
Russ snapped the television switch and the screen went blank. The
laboratory suddenly was a place of queer lights and shadows, bulging
with grotesque machines, with sprawling apparatus, a place that hinted
darkly of vast power and mighty forces.
The scientist sat up in his chair. "We've come a long way, Greg. A long,
long way. We have the greatest power man has ever known; we have an
almost incomprehensible space drive; we have three-dimensional
television."
"And," said Greg dryly, "we took Chambers to the cleaners on the
market."
They sat in silence. Greg smelled the smoke from Russ's pipe, mixed with
the taint of lubricant and the faint lingering scent of ionized air.
"We mustn't underrate Chambers, however," he declared. "The man made one
mistake. He underrated us. We can't repeat his mistake. He is dangerous
all the time. He will stop at nothing. Not even murder."
"He's going easy now," said Russ. "He's hoping Craven can find something
that will either equal our stuff or beat it. But Craven isn't having any
luck. He's still driving himself on the radiation theory, but he doesn't
seem to make much headway."
"If he got it, just what would it mean?"
"Plenty. With that he could turn all radiations in space to work. The
cosmics, heat, light, everything. Space is full of radiation."
"If it hadn't been for Wilson," Greg said, his voice a snarl, "we
wouldn't have to be worrying about Chambers. Chambers wouldn't know
until we were ready to let him know."
"Wilson!" ejaculated Russ, suddenly leaning forward. "I had forgotten
about Wilson. What do you say we try to find him?"
* * * * *
Harry Wilson sat at his table in the Martian Club and watched the exotic
Martian dance, performed by near-nude girls. Smoke trailed up lazily
from his drooping cigarette as he watched through squinted eyes. There
was something about the dance that got under Wilson's skin.
The music rose, then fell to whispering undertones and suddenly,
unexpectedly, crashed and stopped. The girls were running from the
floor. A wave of smooth, polite applause rippled around the tables.
Wilson sighed and reached for his wine glass. He crushed the cigarette
into a tray and sipped his wine. He glanced around the room, scanning
the bobbing, painted faces of the night--the great, the near-great, the
near-enough-to-touch-the-great. Brokers and businessmen, artists and
writers and actors. There were others, too, queer night-life shadows
that no one knew much about, or that one heard too much about ... the
playboys and the ladies of family and fortune, correctly attired men,
gorgeously, sleekly attired women.
And--Harry Wilson. The waiters called him Mr. Wilson. He heard people
whispering about him asking who he was. His soul soaked it in and cried
for more. Good food, good drinks, the pastels of the walls, the soft
lights and weird, exotic music. The cold but colorful correctness of it
all.
Just two months ago he had stood outside the club, a stranger in the
city, a mechanic from a little out-of-the-way laboratory, a man who was
paid a pittance for his skill. He had stood outside and watched his
employers walk up the steps and through the magic doors. He had watched
in bitterness....
But now!
The orchestra was striking up a tune. A blonde nodded at him from a
near-by table. Solemnly, with the buzz of wine in his brain and its
hotness in his blood, he returned the nod.
Someone was speaking to him, calling him by name. He looked around, but
there was no one looking at him now. And once again, through that flow
of music, through the hum of conversation, through the buzzing of his
own brain, came the voice, cold and sharp as steel:
"Harry Wilson!"
It sent a shudder through him. He reached for the wine glass again, but
his hand stopped half-way to the stem, paused and trembled at what he
saw.
* * * * *
For there was a gray vagueness in front of him, a sort of shimmer of
nothingness, and out of that shimmer materialized a pencil.
As he watched, in stricken terror, the point of the pencil dropped to
the tablecloth and slowly, precisely, it started to move. He stared,
hypnotized, unbelieving, with the fingers of madness probing at his
brain. The pencil wrote:
Wilson, you sold me out.
The man at the table tried to speak, tried to shriek, but his tongue and
throat were dry and only harsh breath rattled in his mouth.
The pencil moved on mercilessly:
But you will pay. No matter where you go, I will find you. You
cannot hide from me.
The pencil slowly lifted its point from the table and suddenly was gone,
as if it had never been. Wilson, eyes wide and filled with terrible
fear, stared at the black words on the cloth.
Wilson, you sold me out. But you will pay. No matter where you go, I
will find you. You cannot hide from me.
The music pulsated in the room, the hum of conversation ran like an
undertone, but Wilson did not hear. His entire consciousness was
centered on the writing, the letters and the words that filled his soul
with dread.
Something seemed to snap within him. The cold wind of terror reached out
and struck at him. He staggered from the chair. His hand swept the wine
glass from the table and it shattered into chiming shards.
"They can't do this to me!" he shrieked.
There was a silence in the room a silence of terrible accusation.
Everyone was staring at him. Eyebrows raised.
* * * * *
A waiter was at his elbow. "Do you feel ill, sir?"
And then, on unsteady feet, he was being led away. Behind him he heard
the music once again, heard the rising hum of voices.
Someone set his hat on his head, was holding his coat. The cold air of
the night struck his face and the doors sighed closed behind him.
"I'd take it easy going down the step, sir," counseled the doorman.
An aero-taxi driver held open the door of the cab and saluted.
"Where to, sir?"
Wilson stumbled in and stammered out his address. The taxi droned into
the traffic lane.
Hands twitching, Wilson fumbled with the key, took minutes to open the
door into his apartment. Finally the lock clicked and he pushed open the
door. His questing finger found the wall switch. Light flooded the room.
Wilson heaved a sigh of relief. He felt safe here. This place belonged
to him. It was his home, his retreat....
A low laugh, hardly more than a chuckle, sounded behind him. He whirled
and for a moment, blinking in the light, he saw nothing. Then something
stirred by one of the windows, gray and vague, like a sheet of moving
fog.
As he watched, shrinking back against the wall, the grayness deepened,
took the form of a man. And out of that mistiness a face was etched, a
face that had no single line of humor in it, a bleak face with the fire
of anger in the eyes.
"Manning!" shrieked Wilson. "Manning!" He wheeled and sprinted for the
door, but the gray figure moved, too ... incredibly fast, as if it were
wind-blown vapor, and barred his path to the door.
"Why are you running away?" Manning's voice mocked. "Certainly you
aren't afraid of me."
"Look," Wilson whimpered, "I didn't think of what it meant. I just was
tired of working the way Page made me work. Tired of the little salary I
got. I wanted money. I was hungry for money."
"So you sold us out," said Manning.
"No," cried Wilson, "I didn't think of it that way. I didn't stop to
think."
"Think now, then," said Manning gravely. "Think of this. No matter where
you are, no matter where you go, no matter what you do, I'll always be
watching you, I'll never let you rest. I'll never give you a minute's
peace."
"Please," pleaded Wilson. "Please, go away and leave me. I'll give you
back the money ... there's some of it left."
"You sold out for twenty thousand," said Manning. "You could have gotten
twenty million. Chambers would have paid that much to know what you
could tell him, because it was worth twenty billion."
Wilson's breath was coming in panting gasps. He dropped his coat and
backed away. The back of his knees collided with a chair and he folded
up, sat down heavily, still staring at the gray mistiness that was a
man.
"Think of that, Wilson," Manning went on sneeringly. "You could have
been a millionaire. Maybe even a billionaire. You could have had all the
fine things these other people have. But you only got twenty thousand."
"What can I do?" begged Wilson.
The misty face split in a sardonic grin.
"I don't believe there's anything left for you to do."
Before Wilson's eyes the face dissolved, lost its lines, seemed to melt
away. Only streaming, swirling mist, then a slight refraction in the air
and then nothing.
Slowly Wilson rose to his feet, reached for the bottle of whiskey on the
table. His hand shook so that the liquor splashed. When he raised the
glass to his mouth, his still-shaking hand poured half the drink over
his white shirt front.
_CHAPTER NINE_
Ludwig Stutsman pressed his thin, straight lips together. "So that's the
setup," he said.
Across the desk Spencer Chambers studied the man. Stutsman was like a
wolf, lean and cruel and vicious. He even looked like a wolf, with his
long, thin face, his small, beady eyes, the thin, bloodless lips. But he
was the kind of man who didn't always wait for instructions, but went
ahead and used his own judgment. And in a ruthless sort of way, his
judgment was always right.
"Only as a last resort," cautioned Chambers, "do I want you to use the
extreme measures you are so fond of using. If they should prove
necessary, we can always use them. But not yet. I want to settle this
thing in the quietest way possible. Page and Manning are two men who
can't simply disappear. There'd be a hunt, an investigation, an ugly
situation."
"I understand," agreed Stutsman. "If something should happen to their
notes, if somebody could find them. Perhaps you. If you found them on
your desk one morning."
The two men measured one another with their eyes, more like enemies
than men working for the same ends.
"Not my desk," snapped Chambers, "Craven's. So that Craven could
discover this new energy. Whatever Craven discovers belongs to
Interplanetary."
Chambers rose from his chair and walked to the window, looked out. After
a moment's time, he turned and walked back again, sat down in his chair.
Leaning back, he matched his fingertips, his teeth flashing in a grin
under his mustache.
"I don't know anything about what's going on," he said. "I don't even
know someone has discovered material energy. That's up to Craven. He has
to find it. Both you and Craven work alone. I know nothing about either
of you."
Stutsman's jaw closed like a steel trap. "I've always worked alone."
"By the way," said Chambers, the edge suddenly off his voice, "how are
things going in the Jovian confederacy? I trust you left everything in
good shape."
"As good as could be expected," Stutsman replied. "The people are still
uneasy, half angry. They still remember Mallory."
"But Mallory," objected Chambers, "is on a prison ship. In near Mercury
now, I believe."
Stutsman shook his head. "They still remember him. We'll have trouble
out there one of these days."
"I would hate to have that happen," remarked Chambers softly. "I would
regret it very much. I sent you out there to see that nothing happened."
"The trouble out there won't be a flash to this thing you were telling
me about," snapped Stutsman.
"I'm leaving that in your hands, too," Chambers told him. "I know you
can take care of it."
Stutsman rose. "I can take care of it."
"I'm sure you can," Chambers said.
He remained standing after Stutsman left, looking at the door through
which the man had gone. Maybe it had been a mistake to call Stutsman in
from Callisto. Maybe it was a mistake to use Stutsman at all. He didn't
like a lot of things the man did ... or the way he did them. Brutal
things.
* * * * *
Slowly Chambers sat down again and his face grew hard.
He had built an empire of many worlds. That couldn't be done with gentle
methods and no sure goal. Fighting every inch from planet to planet, he
had used power to gain power. And now that empire was threatened by two
men who had found a greater power. That threat had to be smashed! It
would be smashed!
Chambers leaned forward and pressed a buzzer.
"Yes, Mr. Chambers?" said a voice in the communicator.
"Send Dr. Craven in," commanded Chambers.
Craven came in, slouchily, his hair standing on end, his eyes peering
through the thick-lensed glasses.
"You sent for me," he growled, taking a chair.
"Yes, I did," said Chambers. "Have a drink?"
"No. And no smoke either."
Chambers took a long cigar from the box on his desk, clipped off the end
and rolled it in his mouth.
* * * * *
"I'm a busy man," Craven reminded him.
Puckering lines of amusement wrinkled Chambers' eyes as he lit up,
watching Craven.
"You do seem to be busy, Doctor," he said. "I only wish you had
something concrete to report."
The scientist bristled. "I may have in a few days, if you leave me alone
and let me work."
"I presume that you are still working on your radiation collector. Any
progress?"
"Not too much. You can't expect a man to turn out discoveries to order.
I'm working almost night and day now. If the thing can be solved, I'll
solve it."
Chambers glowed. "Keep up the good work. But I wanted to talk to you
about something else. You heard, I suppose, that I lost a barrel of
money on the Ranthoor exchange."
Craven smiled, a sardonic twisting of his lips. "I heard something about
it."
"I thought you had," said Chambers sourly. "If not, you would have been
the only one who hadn't heard how Ben Wrail took Chambers for a ride."
"He really took you then," commented Craven. "I thought maybe it was
just one of those stories."
"He took me, but that's not what's worrying me. I want to know how he
did it. No man, not even the most astute student of the market, could
have foretold the trend of the market the way he did. And Wrail isn't
the most astute. It isn't natural when a man who has always played the
safe side suddenly turns the market upside down. Even less natural when
he never makes a mistake."
"Well," demanded Craven, "what do you want me to do about it? I'm a
scientist. I've never owned a share of stock in my life."
"There's an angle to it that might interest you," said Chambers
smoothly, leaning back, puffing at the cigar. "Wrail is a close friend
of Manning. And Wrail himself didn't have the money it took to swing
those deals. Somebody furnished that money."
"Manning?" asked Craven.
"What do you think?"
"If Manning's mixed up in it," said Craven acidly, "there isn't anything
any of us can do about it. You're bucking money and genius together.
This Manning is no slouch of a scientist himself and Page is better.
They're a combination."
* * * * *
"You think they're good?" asked Chambers.
"Good? Didn't they discover material energy?" The scientist glowered at
his employer. "That ought to be answer enough."
"Yes, I know," Chambers agreed irritably. "But can you tell me how they
worked this market deal?"
Craven grimaced. "I can guess. Those boys didn't stop with just finding
how to harness material energy. They probably have more things than you
can even suspect. They were working with force fields, you remember,
when they stumbled onto the energy. Force fields are something we don't
know much about. A man monkeying around with them is apt to find almost
anything."
"What are you getting at?"
"My guess would be that they have a new kind of television working in
the fourth dimension, using time as a factor. It would penetrate
anything. Nothing could stop it. It could go anywhere, at a speed many
times the speed of light ... almost instantaneously."
Chambers sat upright in his chair. "Are you _sure_ about this?"
Craven shook his head. "Just a guess. I tried to figure out what I would
do if I were Page and Manning and had the things they had. That's all."
"And what would you do?"
Craven smiled dourly. "I'd be using that television right in this
office," he said. "I'd keep you and me under observation all the time.
If what I think is true, Manning is watching us now and has heard every
word we said."
Chambers' face was a harsh mask of anger. "I don't believe it could be
done!"
"Doctor Craven is right," said a quiet voice.
Chambers swung around in his chair and gasped. Greg Manning stood inside
the room, just in front of the desk.
"I hope you don't mind," said Greg. "I've been wanting to have a talk
with you."
Craven leaped to his feet, his eyes shining. "Three dimensions!" he
whispered. "How did you do it?"
Greg chuckled. "I haven't patented the idea, Doctor. I'd rather not tell
you just now."
"You will accept my congratulations, however?" asked Craven.
"That's generous of you. I really hadn't expected this much."
"I mean it," said Craven. "Damned if I don't." Chambers was on his feet,
leaning across the desk, with his hand held out. Greg's right hand came
out slowly.
"Sorry, I really can't shake hands," he said. "I'm not here, you know.
Just my image."
Chambers' hand dropped to the desk. "Stupid of me not to realize that.
You looked so natural." He sat back in his chair again, brushed his gray
mustache. A smile twisted his lips. "So you've been watching me?"
"Off and on," Greg said.
"And what is the occasion of this visit?" asked Chambers. "You could
have held a distinct advantage by remaining unseen. I didn't entirely
believe what Craven told me, you know."
"That isn't the point at all," declared Greg. "Maybe we can get to
understand one another."
"So you're ready to talk business."
"Not in the sense you mean," Greg said. "I'm not willing to make
concessions, but there's no reason why we have to fight one another."
"Why, no," said Chambers, "there's no reason for that. I'll be willing
to buy your discovery."
"I wouldn't sell it to you," Greg told him.
"You wouldn't? Why not? I'm prepared to pay for it."
"You'd pay the price, all right. Anything I asked ... even if it
bankrupted you. Then you'd mark it down to loss, and scrap material
energy. And I'll tell you why."
* * * * *
A terrible silence hung in the room as the two men eyed one another
across the table.
"You wouldn't use it," Greg went on, "because it would remove the
stranglehold you have on the planets. It would make power too cheap. It
would eliminate the necessity of your rented accumulators. The Jovian
moons and Mars could stand on their feet without the power you ship to
them. You could make billions in legitimate profits selling the
apparatus to manufacture the energy ... but you wouldn't want that. You
want to be dictator of the Solar System. And that is what I intend to
stop."
"Listen, Manning," said Chambers, "you're a reasonable man. Let's talk
this thing over without anger. What do you plan to do?"
"I could put my material engines on the market," said Greg. "That would
ruin you. You wouldn't move an accumulator after that. Your
Interplanetary stock wouldn't be worth the paper it is written on.
Material energy would wipe you out."
"You forget I have franchises on those planets," Chambers reminded him.
"I'd fight you in the courts until hell froze over."
"I'd prove convenience, economy and necessity. Any court in any land, on
any planet, would rule for me."
Chambers shook his head. "Not Martian or Jovian courts. I'd tell them to
rule for me and the courts outside of Earth do what I tell them to."
* * * * *
Greg straightened and backed from the desk. "I hate to ruin a man.
You've worked hard. You've built a great company. I would be willing, in
return for a hands-off policy on your part, to hold up any announcement
of my material energy until you had time to get out, to save what you
could."
Hard fury masked Chambers' face. "You'll never build a material energy
engine outside your laboratory. Don't worry about ruining me. I won't
allow you to stand in my way. I hope you understand."
"I understand too well. But even if you are a dictator out on Mars and
Venus, even if you do own Mercury and boss the Jovian confederacy,
you're just a man to me. A man who stands for things that I don't like."
Greg stopped and his eyes were like ice crystals.
"You talked to Stutsman today," he said. "If I were you, I wouldn't let
Stutsman do anything rash. Russ Page and I might have to fight back."
Mockery tinged Chambers' voice. "Am I to take this as a declaration of
war, Mr. Manning?"
"Take it any way you like," Greg said. "I came here to give you a
proposition, and you tell me you're going to smash me. All I have to say
to you, Chambers, is this--when you get ready to smash me, you'd better
have a deep, dark hole all picked out for yourself to hide in. Because
I'll hand you back just double anything you hand out."
_CHAPTER TEN_
"One of us will have to watch all the time," Greg told Russ. "We can't
take any chances. Stutsman will try to reach us sooner or later and we
have to be ready for him."
He glanced at the new radar screen they had set up that morning beside
the bank of other controls. Any ship coming within a hundred miles of
the laboratory would be detected instantly and pinpointed.
The board flashed now. In the screen they saw a huge passenger ship
spearing down toward the airport south of them.
"With the port that close," said Russ, "we'll get a lot of signals."
"I ordered the Belgium factory to rush work on the ship," said Greg.
"But it will be a couple of weeks yet. We just have to sit tight and
wait. As soon as we have the ship we'll start in on Chambers; but until
we get the ship, we just have to dig in and stay on the defensive."
He studied the scene in the screen. The ship had leveled off, was
banking in to the port. His eyes turned away, took in the laboratory
with its crowding mass of machinery.
"We don't want to fool ourselves about Chambers," he said. "He may not
have the power here on Earth that he does on the other planets, but he's
got plenty. Feeling the way he does, he'll try to finish us off in a
hurry now."
Russ reached out to the table that stood beside the bank of controls and
picked up a small, complicated mechanism. Its face bore nine dials, with
the needles on three of them apparently registering, the other six
motionless.
"What is that?" asked Greg.
"A mechanical detective," said Russ. "A sort of mechanical shadow. While
you were busy with the stock market stunt, I made several of them. One
for Wilson and another for Chambers and still another for Craven." He
hoisted and lowered the one in his hand. "This one is for Stutsman."
"A shadow?" asked Greg. "Do you mean that thing will trail Stutsman?"
"Not only trail him," said Russ. "It will find him, wherever he may be.
Some object every person wears or carries is made of iron or some other
magnetic metal. This 'shadow' contains a tiny bit of that ridiculous
military decoration that Stutsman never allows far away from him. Find
that decoration and you find Stutsman. In another one I have a chunk of
Wilson's belt buckle, that college buckle, you know, that he's so proud
of. Chambers has a ring made of a piece of meteoric iron and that's the
bait for another machine. Have a tiny piece off Craven's spectacles in
his machine. It was easy to get the stuff. The force field enables a man
to reach out and take anything he wants to, from a massive machine to a
microscopic bit of matter. It was a cinch to get the stuff I needed."
Russ chuckled and put the machine back on the table. He gestured toward
it.
"It maintains a tiny field similar to our television field," he
explained. "But it's modified along a special derivation with a magnetic
result. It can follow and find the original mass of any metallic
substance it may contain."
"Clever," commented Greg.
Russ lit his pipe, puffed comfortably. "We needed something like that."
The red light on the board snapped on and blinked. Russ reached out and
slammed home the lever, twirled dials. It was only another passenger
ship. They relaxed, but not too much.
* * * * *
"I wonder what he's up to," said Russ.
Stutsman's car had stopped in the dock section of New York. Crumbling,
rotting piers and old tumbledown warehouses, deserted and unused since
the last ship sailed the ocean before giving way to air commerce, loomed
darkly, like grim ghosts, in the darkness.
Stutsman had gotten out of the car and said: "Wait here."
"Yes, sir," said the voice of the driver.
Stutsman strode away, down a dark street. The televisor kept pace with
him and on the screen he could be seen as a darker shape moving among
the shadows of that old, almost forgotten section of the Solar System's
greatest city.
Another shadow detached itself from the darkness of the street, shuffled
toward Stutsman.
"Sir," said a whining voice, "I haven't eaten ..."
There was a swift movement as Stutsman's stick lashed out, a thud as it
connected with the second shadow's head. The shadow crumpled on the
pavement. Stutsman strode on.
Greg sucked in his breath. "He isn't very sociable tonight."
Stutsman ducked into an alley where even deeper darkness lay. Russ, with
a delicate adjustment, slid the televisor along, closer to Stutsman,
determined not to lose sight of him for an instant.
The man suddenly turned into a doorway so black that nothing could be
seen. Sounds of sharp, impatient rappings came out of the screen as
Stutsman struck the door with his stick.
Brilliant illumination sprang out over the doorway, but Stutsman seemed
not to see it, went on knocking. The colors on the screen were
peculiarly distorted.
"Ultra-violet," grunted Greg. "Whoever he's calling on wants to have a
good look before letting anybody in."
The door creaked open and a shaft of normal light spewed out into the
street, turning its murkiness to pallid yellow.
Stutsman stepped inside.
The man at the door jerked his head. "Back room," he said.
* * * * *
The televisor slid through the door into the lighted room behind
Stutsman. Dust lay thick on the woodwork and floors. Patches of plaster
had broken away. Furrows zigzagged across the floor, marking the path of
heavy boxes or furniture which had been pushed along in utter disdain of
the flooring. Cheap wall-paper hung in tatters from the walls, streaked
with water from some broken pipe.
But the back room was a startling contrast to the first. Rich,
comfortable furniture filled it. The floor was covered with a
steel-cloth rug and steel-cloth hangings, colorfully painted, hid the
walls.
A man sat under a lamp, reading a newspaper. He rose to his feet, like
the sudden uncoiling of springs.
Russ gasped. That face was one of the best known faces in the entire
Solar System. A ratlike face, with cruel cunning printed on it that had
been on front pages and TV screens often, but never for pay.
"Scorio!" whispered Russ.
Greg nodded and his lips were drawn tight.
"Stutsman," said Scorio, surprised. "You're the last person in the world
I was expecting. Come in. Have a chair. Make yourself comfortable."
Stutsman snorted. "This isn't a social call."
"I didn't figure it was," replied the gangster, "but sit down anyway."
Gingerly Stutsman sat down on the edge of a chair, hunched forward.
Scorio resumed his seat and waited.
"I have a job for you," Stutsman announced bluntly.
"Fine. It isn't often you have one for me. Three-four years ago, wasn't
it?"
"We may be watched," warned Stutsman.
The mobster started from his chair, his eyes darting about the room.
Stutsman grunted disgustedly. "If we're watched, there isn't anything we
can do about it."
"We can't, huh?" snarled the gangster. "Why not?"
"Because the watcher is on the West Coast. We can't reach him. If he's
watching, he can see every move we make, hear every word we say."
"Who is it?"
* * * * *
"Greg Manning or Russ Page," said Stutsman. "You've heard of them?"
"Sure. I heard of them."
"They have a new kind of television," said Stutsman. "They can see and
hear everything that's happening on Earth, perhaps in all the Solar
System. But I don't think they're watching us now. Craven has a machine
that can detect their televisor. It registers certain field effects they
use. They weren't watching when I left Craven's laboratory just a few
minutes ago. They may have picked me up since, but I don't think so."
"So Craven has made a detector," said Greg calmly. "He can tell when
we're watching now."
"He's a clever cuss," agreed Russ.
"Take a look at that machine now," urged Scorio. "See if they're
watching. You shouldn't have come here. You should have let me know and
I would have met you some place. I can't have people knowing where my
hideout is."
"Quiet down," snapped Stutsman. "I haven't got the machine. It weighs
half a ton."
Scorio sank deeper into his chair, worried. "Do you want to take a
chance and talk business?"
"Certainly. That's why I'm here. This is the proposition. Manning and
Page are working in a laboratory out on the West Coast, in the
mountains. I'll give you the exact location later. They have some papers
we want. We wouldn't mind if something happened to the laboratory. It
might, for example blow up. But we want the papers first."
* * * * *
Scorio said nothing. His face was quiet and cunning.
"Give me the papers," said Stutsman, "and I'll see that you get to any
planet you want to. And I'll give you two hundred thousand in
Interplanetary Credit certificates. Give me proof that the laboratory
blew up or melted down or something else happened to it and I'll boost
the figure to five hundred thousand."
Scorio did not move a muscle as he asked: "Why don't you have some of
your own mob do this job?"
"Because I can't be connected with it in any way," said Stutsman. "If
you slip up and something happens, I won't be able to do a thing for
you. That's why the price is high."
The gangster's eyes slitted. "If the papers are worth that much to you,
why wouldn't they be worth as much to me?"
"They wouldn't be worth a dime to you."
"Why not?"
"Because you couldn't read them," said Stutsman.
"I can read," retorted the gangster.
"Not the kind of language on those papers. There aren't more than two
dozen people in the Solar System who could read it, perhaps a dozen who
could understand it, maybe half a dozen who could follow the directions
in the papers." He leaned forward and jabbed a forefinger at the
gangster. "And there are only two people in the System who could write
it."
"What the hell kind of a language is it that only two dozen people could
read?"
"It isn't a language, really. It's mathematics."
"Oh, arithmetic."
"No," Stutsman said. "Mathematics. You see? You don't even know the
difference between the two, so what good would the papers do you?"
Scorio nodded. "Yeah, you're right."
_CHAPTER ELEVEN_
The Paris-Berlin express thundered through the night, a gigantic ship
that rode high above the Earth. Far below one could see the dim lights
of eastern Europe.
Harry Wilson pressed his face against the window, staring down. There
was nothing to see but the tiny lights. They were alone, he and the
other occupants of the ship ... alone in the dark world that surrounded
them.
But Wilson sensed some other presence in the ship, someone besides the
pilot and his mechanics up ahead, the hostess and the three stodgy
traveling men who were his fellow passengers.
Wilson's hair ruffled at the base of his skull, tingling with an unknown
fear that left him shaken.
A voice whispered in his ear: "Harry Wilson. So you are running away!"
Just a tiny voice that seemed hardly a voice at all, it seemed at once
to come from far away and yet from very near. The voice, with an edge of
coldness on it, was one he never would forget.
He cowered in his seat, whimpering.
The voice came again: "Didn't I tell you that you couldn't run away?
That no matter where you went, I'd find you?"
"Go away," Wilson whispered huskily. "Leave me alone. Haven't you
hounded me enough?"
"No," answered the voice, "not enough. Not yet. You sold us out. You
warned Chambers about our energy and now Chambers is sending men to kill
us. But they won't succeed, Wilson."
"You can't hurt me," said Wilson defiantly. "You can't do anything but
talk to me. You're trying to drive me mad, but you can't. I won't let
you. I'm not going to pay any more attention to you."
The whisper chuckled.
"You can't," argued Wilson wildly. "All you can do is talk to me. You've
never done anything but that. You drove me out of New York and out of
London and now you're driving me out of Paris. But Berlin is as far as I
will go. I won't listen to you any more."
"Wilson," whispered the voice, "look inside your bag. The bag, Wilson,
where you are carrying that money. That stack of credit certificates.
Almost eleven thousand dollars, what is left of the twenty thousand
Chambers paid you."
With a wild cry Wilson clawed at his bag, snapped it open, pawed through
it.
* * * * *
The credit certificates were gone!
"You took my money," he shrieked. "You took everything I had. I haven't
got a cent. Nothing except a few dollars in my pocket."
"You haven't got that either, Wilson," whispered the voice.
There was a sound of ripping cloth as something like a great, powerful
hand flung aside Wilson's coat, tore away the inside pocket. There was a
brief flash of a wallet and a bundle of papers, which vanished.
The hostess was hurrying toward him.
"Is there something wrong?"
"They took ..." Wilson began and stopped.
What could he tell her? Could he say that a man half way across the
world had robbed him?
The three traveling men were looking at him.
"I'm sorry, miss," he stammered. "I really am. I fell asleep and
dreamed."
He sat down again, shaken. Shivering, he huddled back into the corner of
his seat. His hands explored the torn coat pocket. He was stranded, high
in the air, somewhere between Paris and Berlin ... stranded without
money, without a passport, with nothing but the clothes he wore and the
few personal effects in his bag.
Fighting to calm himself, he tried to reason out his plight. The plane
was entering the Central European Federation and that, definitely, was
no place to be without a passport or without visible means of support. A
thousand possibilities flashed through his mind. They might think he was
a spy. He might be cited for illegal entry. He might be framed by secret
police.
Terror perched on his shoulder and whispered to him. He shivered
violently and drew farther back into the corner of the seat. He clasped
his hands, beat them against his huddled knees.
He would cable friends back in America and have them identify him and
vouch for his character. He would borrow some money from them, just
enough to get back to America. But whom would he cable? And with aching
bitterness in his breast, Harry Wilson came face to face with the
horrible realization that nowhere in the world, nowhere in the Solar
System, was there a single person who was his friend. There was no one
to help him.
He bowed his head in his hands and sobbed, his shoulders jerking
spasmodically, the sobs racking his body.
The traveling men stared at him unable to understand. The hostess looked
briskly helpless. Wilson knew he looked like a scared fool and he didn't
care.
He _was_ scared.
* * * * *
Gregory Manning riffled the sheaf of credit certificates, the wallet,
the passport and pile of other papers that lay upon the desk in front of
him.
"That closes one little incident," he said grimly. "That takes care of
our friend Wilson."
"Maybe you were a bit too harsh with him, Greg," suggested Russell Page.
Greg shook his head. "He was a traitor, the lowest thing alive. He sold
the confidence we placed in him. He traded something that was not his to
trade. He did it for money and now I've taken that money from him."
He shoved the pile of certificates to one side.
"Now I've got this stuff," he said, "I don't know what to do with it. We
don't want to keep it."
"Why not send it to Chambers?" suggested Russ. "He will find the
passport and the money on his desk in the morning. Give him something to
think about tomorrow."
_CHAPTER TWELVE_
Scorio snarled at the four men: "I want you to get the thing done right.
I don't want bungling. Understand?"
The bulky, flat-faced man with the scar across his cheek shuffled
uneasily. "We went over it a dozen times. We know just what to do."
He grinned at Scorio, but the grin was lopsided, more like a sneering
grimace. At one time the man had failed to side-step a heat ray and it
had left a neat red line drawn across the right cheek, nipped the end of
the ear.
"All right, Pete," said Scorio, glaring at the man, "your job is the
heavy work, so just keep your mind on it. You've got the two heaters and
the kit."
Pete grinned lopsidedly again. "Yeah, my own kit. I can open anything
hollow with this rig."
"You got a real job tonight," snarled Scorio. "Two doors and a safe.
Sure you can do it?"
"Just leave it to me," Pete growled.
"Chizzy, you're to pilot," Scorio snapped. "Know the coordinates?"
"Sure," said Chizzy, "know them by heart. Do it with my eyes shut."
"Keep your eyes open. We can't have anything go wrong. This is too
important. You swoop in at top speed and land on the roof. Stand by the
controls and keep a hand on the big heater just in case of trouble.
Pete, Max and Reg will go to the lockdoor. Reg will stay there with the
buzzer and three drums of ammunition."
He whirled on Reg. "You got that ammunition?"
Reg nodded emphatically. "Four drums of it," he said. "One solid round
in the gun. Another drum of solid and two explosive."
"There's a thousand rounds in each drum," snapped Scorio, "but they last
only a minute, so do your firing in bursts."
"I ain't handled buzzers all these years without knowing something about
them."
"There's only two men there," said Scorio, "and they'll probably be
asleep. Come down with your motor dead. The lab roof is thick and the
plane landing on those thick tires won't wake them. But be on your guard
all the time. Pete and Max will go through the lockdoor into the
laboratory and open the safe. Dump all the papers and money and whatever
else you find into the bags and then get out fast. Hop into the plane
and take off. When you're clear of the building, turn the heaters on it.
I want it melted down and the men and stuff inside with it. Don't leave
even a button unmelted. Get it?"
* * * * *
"Sure, chief," said Pete. He dusted his hands together.
"Now get going. Beat it."
The four men turned and filed out of the room, through the door leading
to the tumbledown warehouse where was hidden the streamlined metal ship.
Swiftly they entered it and the ship nosed gently upward, blasting out
through a broken, frameless skylight, climbing up and up, over the
gleaming spires of New York.
Back in the room hung with steel-cloth curtains, alone, Scorio lit a
cigarette and chuckled. "They won't have a chance," he said.
"Who won't?" asked a tiny voice from almost in front of him.
"Why, Manning and Page ..." said Scorio, and then stopped. The fire of
the match burned down and scorched his fingers. He dropped it. "Who
asked that?" he roared.
"I did," said the piping voice.
Scorio looked down. A three-inch man sat on a matchbox on the desk!
"Who are you?" the gangster shouted.
"I'm Manning," said the little man. "The one you're going to kill. Don't
you remember?"
"Damn you!" shrieked Scorio. His hand flipped open a drawer and pulled
out a flame pistol. The muzzle of the pistol came up and blasted.
Screwed down to its smallest diameter, the gun's aim was deadly. A
straight lance of flame, no bigger than a pencil, streamed out, engulfed
the little man, bored into the table top. The box of matches exploded
with a gush of red that was a dull flash against the blue blaze of the
gun.
But the figure of the man stood _within the flame_! Stood there and
waved an arm at Scorio. The piping voice came out of the heart of the
gun's breath.
"Maybe I'd better get a bit smaller. Make me harder to hit. More sport
that way."
* * * * *
Scorio's finger lifted from the trigger. The flame snapped off.
Laboriously climbing out of the still smoking furrow left in the oaken
table top was Greg Manning, not more than an inch tall now.
The gangster laid the gun on the table, stepped closer, warily. With the
palm of a mighty hand he swatted viciously at the little figure.
"I got you now!"
But the figure seemed to ooze upright between his fingers, calmly
stepped off his hand onto the table. And now it began to grow. Watching
it, Scorio saw it grow to six inches and there it stopped.
"What are you?" he breathed.
"I told you," said the little image. "I'm Gregory Manning. The man you
set out to kill. I've watched every move you've made and known
everything you planned."
"But that isn't possible," protested Scorio. "You're out on the West
Coast. This is some trick. I'm just seeing things."
"You aren't seeing anything imaginary. I'm really here, in this room
with you. I could lift my finger and kill you if I wished ... and maybe
I should."
Scorio stepped back a pace.
"But I'm not going to," said Manning. "I have something better saved for
you. Something more appropriate."
"You can't touch me!"
"Look," said Manning sternly. He pointed his finger at a chair. It
suddenly grew cloudy, became a wisp of trailing smoke, was gone.
The gangster backed away, eyes glued to the spot where the chair had
vanished.
"Look here," piped the little voice. Scorio jerked his head around and
looked.
The chair was in Manning's hand. A tiny chair, but the very one that had
disappeared from the room a moment before.
"Watch out!" warned Manning, and heaved the chair. The tiny chair
seemed to float in the air. Then with a rush it gathered speed, grew
larger. In a split second it was a full-sized chair and it was hurtling
straight at the gangster's head.
With a strangled cry Scorio threw up his arms. The chair crashed into
him, bowled him over.
"Now do you believe me?" demanded Manning.
Scrambling to his feet, Scorio gibbered madly, for the six-inch figure
was growing. He became as large as the average man, and then much
larger. His head cleared the high ceiling by scant inches. His mighty
hands reached out for the gangster.
Scorio scuttled away on hands and knees, yelping with terror.
Powerful hands seemed to seize and lift him. The room was blotted out.
The Earth was gone. He was in a place where there was nothing. No light,
no heat, no gravitation. For one searing, blasting second he seemed to
be floating in strangely suspended animation. Then with a jolt he became
aware of new surroundings.
He blinked his eyes and looked around. He was in a great laboratory that
hummed faintly with the suggestion of terrific power, that smelled of
ozone and seemed filled with gigantic apparatus.
Two men stood in front of him.
He staggered back.
"Manning!" he gasped.
Manning grinned savagely at him. "Sit down, Scorio. You won't have long
to wait. Your boys will be along any minute now."
* * * * *
Chizzy crouched over the controls, his eyes on the navigation chart.
Only the thin screech of parted air disturbed the silence of the ship.
The high scream and the slow, precise snack-snack of cards as Reg and
Max played a game of double solitaire with a cold, emotionless
precision.
The plane was near the stratosphere, well off the traveled air lanes. It
was running without lights, but the cabin bulbs were on, carefully
shielded.
Pete sat in the co-pilot's chair beside Chizzy. His blank,
expressionless eyes stared straight ahead.
"I don't like this job," he complained.
"Why not?" asked Chizzy.
"Page and Manning aren't the kind of guys a fellow had ought to be
fooling around with. They ain't just chumps. You fool with characters
like them and you got trouble."
Chizzy growled at him disgustedly, bent to his controls.
Straight ahead was a thin sliver of a dying Moon that gave barely
enough illumination to make out the great, rugged blocks of the
mountains, like dark, shadowy brush-strokes on a newly started canvas.
Pete shuddered. There was something about the thin, watery moonlight,
and those brush-stroke hills....
"It seems funny up here," he said.
"Hell," growled Chizzy, "you're going soft in your old age."
Silence fell between the two. The snack-snack of the cards continued.
"You ain't got nothing to be afraid of," Chizzy told Pete. "This tub is
the safest place in the world. She's overpowered a dozen times. She can
outfly anything in the air. She's rayproof and bulletproof and
bombproof. Nothing can hurt us."
But Pete wasn't listening. "That moonlight makes a man see things. Funny
things. Like pictures in the night."
"You're balmy," declared Chizzy.
Pete started out of his seat. His voice gurgled in his throat. He
pointed with a shaking finger out into the night.
"Look!" he yelled "Look!"
Chizzy rose out of his seat ... and froze in sudden terror.
Straight ahead of the ship, etched in silvery moon-lines against the
background of the star-sprinkled sky, was a grim and terrible face.
It was as big and hard as a mountain.
_CHAPTER THIRTEEN_
The ship was silent now. Even the whisper of the cards had stopped. Reg
and Max were on their feet, startled by the cries of Pete and Chizzy.
"It's Manning!" shrieked Pete. "He's watching us!"
Chizzy's hand whipped out like a striking snake toward the controls and,
as he grasped them, his face went deathly white. For the controls were
locked! They resisted all the strength he threw against them and the
ship still bore on toward that mocking face that hung above the Earth.
"Do something!" screamed Max. "You damn fool, do something!"
"I can't," moaned Chizzy. "The ship is out of control."
It seemed impossible. That ship was fast and tricky and it had reserve
power far beyond any possible need. It handled like a dream ... it was
tops in aircraft. But there was no doubt that some force more powerful
than the engines and controls of the ship itself had taken over.
"Manning's got us!" squealed Pete. "We came out to get him and now he
has us instead!"
The craft was gaining speed. The whining shriek of the air against its
plates grew thinner and higher. Listening, one could almost feel and
hear the sucking of the mighty power that pulled it at an ever greater
pace through the tenuous atmosphere.
The face was gone from the sky now. Only the Moon remained, the Moon and
the brush-stroke mountains far below.
Then, suddenly, the speed was slowing and the ship glided downward, down
into the saw-teeth of the mountains.
"We're falling!" yelled Max, and Chizzy growled at him.
But they weren't falling. The ship leveled off and floated, suspended
above a sprawling laboratory upon a mountain top.
"That's Manning's laboratory," whispered Pete in terror-stricken tones.
The levers yielded unexpectedly. Chizzy flung the power control over,
drove the power of the accumulator bank, all the reserve, into the
engines. The ship lurched, but did not move. The engines whined and
screamed in torture. The cabin's interior was filled with a blast of
heat, the choking odor of smoke and hot rubber. The heavy girders of the
frame creaked under the mighty forward thrust of the engines ... but the
ship stood still, frozen above that laboratory in the hills.
Chizzy, hauling back the lever, turned around, pale. His hand began
clawing for his heat gun. Then he staggered back. For there were only
two men in the cabin with him--Reg and Max. Pete had gone!
"He just disappeared," Max jabbered. "He was standing there in front of
us. Then all at once he seemed to fade, as if he was turning into smoke.
Then he was gone."
* * * * *
Something had descended about Pete. There was no sound, no light, no
heat. He had no sense of weight. It was as if, suddenly, his mind had
become disembodied.
Seeing and hearing and awareness came back to him as one might turn on a
light. From the blackness and the eventless existence of a split second
before, he was catapulted into a world of light and sound.
It was a world that hummed with power, that was ablaze with light, a
laboratory that seemed crammed with mighty banks of massive machinery,
lighted by great globes of creamy brightness, shedding an illumination
white as sunlight, yet shadowless as the light of a cloudy day.
Two men stood in front of him, looking at him, one with a faint smile on
his lips, the other with lines of fear etched across his face. The
smiling one was Gregory Manning and the one who was afraid was Scorio!
With a start, Pete snatched his pistol from its holster. The sights came
up and lined on Manning as he pressed the trigger. But the lancing heat
that sprang from the muzzle of the gun never reached Manning. It seemed
to strike an obstruction less than a foot away. It mushroomed with a
flare of scorching radiance that drove needles of agony into the
gangster's body.
His finger released its pressure and the gun dangled limply from his
hand. He moaned with the pain of burns upon his unprotected face and
hands. He beat feebly at tiny, licking blazes that ran along his
clothing.
Manning was still smiling at him.
"You can't reach me, Pete," he said. "You can only hurt yourself. You're
enclosed within a solid wall of force that matter cannot penetrate."
A voice came from one corner of the room: "I'll bring Chizzy down next."
Pete whirled around and saw Russell Page for the first time. The
scientist sat in front of a great control board, his swift, skillful
fingers playing over the banks of keys, his eyes watching the instrument
and the screen that slanted upward from the control banks.
Pete felt dizzy as he stared at the screen. He could see the interior of
the ship he had been yanked from a moment before. He could see his three
companions, talking excitedly, frightened by his disappearance.
* * * * *
His eyes flicked away from the screen, looked up through the skylight
above him. Outlined against the sky hung the ship. At the nose and
stern, two hemispheres of blue-white radiance fitted over the metal
framework, like the jaws of a powerful vise, holding the craft
immovable.
His gaze went back to the screen again, just in time to see Chizzy
disappear. It was as if the man had been a mere figure chalked upon a
board ... and then someone had taken a sponge and wiped him out.
Russ's fingers were flying over the keys. His thumb reached out and
tripped a lever. There was a slight hum of power.
And Chizzy stood beside him.
Chizzy did not pull his gun. He whimpered and cowered within the
invisible cradle of force.
"You're yellow," Pete snarled at him, but Chizzy only covered his eyes
with his arms.
"Look, boss," said Pete, addressing Scorio, "what are you doing here? We
left you back in New York."
Scorio did not answer. He merely glared. Pete lapsed into silence,
watching.
* * * * *
Manning stood poised before the captives, rocking back and forth on his
heels.
"A nice bag for one evening," he told Russ.
Russ grinned and stoked up his pipe.
Manning turned to the gangster chief. "What do you think we ought to do
with these fellows? We can't leave them in those force shells too long
because they'll die for lack of air. And we can't let them loose because
they might use their guns on us."
"Listen, Manning," Scorio rasped hoarsely, "just name your price to let
us loose. We'll do anything you want."
Manning drew his mouth down. "I can't think of a thing. We just don't
seem to have any use for you."
"Then what in hell," the gangster asked shakily, "are you going to do
with us?"
"You know," said Manning, "I may be a bit old-fashioned along some
lines. Maybe I am. I just don't like the idea of killing people for
money. I don't like people stealing things other people have worked hard
to get. I don't like thieves and murderers and thugs corrupting city
governments, taking tribute on every man, woman and child in our big
cities."
"But look here, Manning," pleaded Scorio, "we'd be good citizens if we
just had a chance."
Manning's face hardened. "You sent these men here to kill us tonight,
didn't you?"
"Well, not exactly. Stutsman kind of wanted you killed, but I told the
boys just to get the stuff in the safe and never mind killing you. I
said to them that you were pretty good eggs and I didn't like to bump
you off, see?"
"I see," said Manning.
He turned his back on Scorio and started to walk away. The gangster
chief came half-way out of his chair, and as he did so, Russ reached out
a single finger and tapped a key. Scorio screamed and beat with his
fists against the wall of force that had suddenly formed about him. That
single tap on the great keyboard had sprung a trap, had been the one
factor necessary to bring into being a force shell already spun and
waiting for him.
Manning did not even turn around at Scorio's scream. He slowly paced his
way down the line of standing gangsters. He stopped in front of Pete and
looked at him.
"Pete," he said, "you've sprung a good many prisons, haven't you?"
"There ain't a jug in the System that can hold me," Pete boasted, "and
that's a fact."
"I believe there's one that could," Greg told him. "One that no man has
ever escaped from, or ever will."
"What's that?" demanded Pete.
"The Vulcan Fleet," said Greg.
Pete looked into the eyes of the man before him and read the purpose in
those eyes. "Don't send me there! Send me any place but there!"
Greg turned to Russ and nodded. Russ's fingers played their tune of doom
upon the keyboard. His thumb depressed a lever. With a roar five
gigantic material energy engines screamed with thrumming power.
Pete disappeared.
The engines roared with thunderous throats, a roar that seemed to drown
the laboratory in solid waves of sound. A curious refractive effect
developed about the straining hulks as space near them bent under their
lashing power.
Months ago Russ and Greg had learned a better way of transmitting power
than by metal bars or through conducting beams. Beams of such power as
were developing now would have smashed atoms to protons and electrons.
Through a window in the side of the near engine, Greg could see the iron
ingot used as fuel dwindling under the sucking force.
* * * * *
The droning died and only a hum remained.
"He's in a prison now he'll never get out of," said Greg calmly. "I
wonder what they'll think when they find him, dressed in civilian
clothes and carrying a heat gun. They'll clap him into a photo-cell and
keep him there until they investigate. When they find out who he is, he
won't get out--he has enough unfinished prison sentences to last a
century or two."
For Pete was on one of the Vulcan Fleet ships, the hell-ships of the
prison fleet. There were confined only the most vicious and the most
depraved of the Solar System's criminals. He would be forced to work
under the flaming whip-lashes of a Sun that hurled such intense
radiations that mere spacesuits were no protection at all. The workers
on the Vulcan Fleet ships wore suits that were in reality photo-cells
which converted the deadly radiations into electric power. For electric
power can be disposed of where heat cannot.
Quailing inside his force shell, Scorio saw his men go, one by one. Saw
them lifted and whisked away, out through the depths of space by the
magic touch upon the keyboards. With terror-widened eyes he watched
Russ set up the equations, saw him trip the activating lever, saw the
men disappear, listened to the thunderous rumbling of the mighty
engines.
Chizzy went to the Outpost, the harsh prison on Neptune's satellite. Reg
went to Titan, clear across the Solar System, where men in the infamous
penal colony labored in the frigid wastes of that moon of Saturn. Max
went to Vesta, the asteroid prison, which long had been the target of
reformers, who claimed that on it 50 per cent of the prisoners died of
boredom and fear.
Max was gone and only Scorio remained.
"Stutsman's the one who got us into this," wailed the gangster. "He's
the man you want to get. Not me. Not the boys. Stutsman."
"I promise you," said Greg, "that we'll take care of Stutsman."
"And Chambers, too," chattered Scorio. "But you can't touch Chambers.
You wouldn't dare."
"We're not worrying about Chambers," Greg told him. "We're not worrying
about anyone. You're the one who had better start doing some."
Scorio cringed.
"Let me tell you about a place on Venus," said Greg. "It's in the center
of a big swamp that stretches for hundreds of miles in every direction.
It's a sort of mountain rising out of the swamp. And the swamp is filled
with beasts and reptiles of every kind. Ravenous things, lusting for
blood. But they don't climb the mountain. A man, if he stayed on the
mountain, would be safe. There's food there. Roots and berries and
fruits and even small animals one could kill. A man might go hungry for
a while, but soon he'd find the things to eat.
"But he'd be alone. No one ever goes near that mountain. I am the only
man who ever set foot on it. Perhaps no one ever will again. At night
you hear the screaming and the crying of the things down in swamp, but
you mustn't pay any attention to them."
* * * * *
Scorio's eyes widened, staring. "You won't send me _there_!"
"You'll find my campfires," Greg told him, "if the rain hasn't washed
them away. It rains a lot. So much and so drearily that you'll want to
leave that mountain and walk down into the swamp, of your own free will,
and let the monsters finish you."
Scorio sat dully. He did not move. Horror glazed his eyes.
Greg signed to Russ. Russ, pipe clenched between his teeth, reached out
his fingers for the keys. The engines droned.
Manning walked slowly to a television control, sat down in the chair
and flipped over a lever. A face stared out of the screen. It was
strangely filled with anger and a sort of half-fear.
"You watched it, didn't you, Stutsman?" Greg asked.
Stutsman nodded. "I watched. You can't get away with it, Manning. You
can't take the law into your own hands that way."
"You and Chambers have been taking the law into your hands for years,"
said Greg. "All I did tonight was clear the Earth of some vermin. Every
one of those men was guilty of murder ... and worse."
"What did you gain by it?" asked Stutsman.
Greg gave a bitter laugh. "I convinced you, Stutsman," he said, "that it
isn't so easy to kill me. I think it'll be some time before you try
again. Better luck next time."
He flipped the switch and turned about in the chair.
Russ jerked his thumb at the skylight. "Might as well finish the ship
now."
Greg nodded.
An instant later there was a fierce, intolerably blue-white light that
lit the mountains for many miles. For just an instant it flared,
exploding into millions of brilliant, harmless sparks that died into
darkness before they touched the ground. The gangster ship was destroyed
beyond all tracing, disintegrated. The metal and quartz of which it was
made were simply gone.
Russ brought his glance back from the skylight, looked at his friend.
"Stutsman will do everything he can to wipe us out. By tomorrow morning
the Interplanetary machine will be rolling. With only one purpose--to
crush us."
"That's right," Greg agreed, "but we're ready for them now. Our ship
left the Belgium factories several hours ago. The _Comet_ towed it out
in space and it's waiting for us now. In a few hours the _Comet_ will be
here to pick us up."
"War in space," said Russ, musingly. "That's what it will be."
"Chambers and his gang won't fight according to any rules. There'll be
no holds barred, no more feeble attempts like the one they tried
tonight. From now on we need a base that simply can't be located."
"The ship," said Russ.
_CHAPTER FOURTEEN_
The _Invincible_ hung in space, an empty, airless hull, the largest
thing afloat.
Chartered freighters, leaving their ports from distant parts of the
Earth, had converged upon her hours before, had unloaded crated
apparatus, storing it in the yawning hull. Then they had departed.
Now the sturdy little space-yacht, _Comet_, was towing the great ship
out into space, 500,000 miles beyond the orbit of the Moon. Slowly the
hull was being taken farther and farther away from possible discovery.
Work on the installation of the apparatus had started almost as soon as
the _Comet_ had first tugged at the ponderous mass. Leaving only a
skeleton crew in charge of the _Comet_, the rest of the selected crew
had begun the assembly of the mighty machines which would transform the
_Invincible_ into a thing of unimaginable power and speed.
The doors were closed and sealed and the air, already stored in the
ship's tanks, was released. The slight acceleration of the _Comet's_
towing served to create artificial weight for easier work, but not
enough to handicap the shifting of the heavier pieces of apparatus. An
electric cable was run back from the little yacht and the _Invincible_
took her first breath of life.
The work advanced rapidly, for every man was more than a mere engineer
or spacebuster. They were a selected crew, the men who had helped to
make the name of Gregory Manning famous throughout the Solar System.
First the engines were installed, then the two groups of five massive
power plants and the single smaller engine as an auxiliary supply plant
for the light, heat, air.
The accumulators of the _Comet_ were drained in a single tremendous
surge and the auxiliary generator started. It in turn awoke to life the
other power plants, to leave them sleeping, idling, but ready for
instant use to develop power such as man never before had dreamed of
holding and molding to his will.
Then, with the gigantic tools these engines supplied ... tools of pure
force and strange space fields ... the work was rapidly completed. The
power boards were set in place, welded in position by a sudden furious
blast of white hot metal and as equally sudden freezing, to be followed
by careful heating and recooling till the beryl-steel reached its
maximum strength. Over the hull swarmed spacesuited men, using that
strange new power, heat-treating the stubborn metal in a manner never
before possible.
The generators were charging the atoms of the ship's beryl-steel hide
with the same hazy force that had trapped and held the gangster ship in
a mighty vise. Thus charged, no material thing could penetrate them. The
greatest meteor would be crushed to drifting dust without so much as
scarring that wall of mighty force ... meteors traveling with a speed
and penetrative power that no gun-hurled projectile could ever hope to
attain.
Riding under her own power, driven by the concentration of gravitational
lines, impregnable to all known forces, containing within her hull the
secrets of many strange devices, the _Invincible_ wheeled in space.
* * * * *
Russell Page lounged in a chair before the control manual of the
tele-transport machine. He puffed placidly at his pipe and looked out
through the great sweep of the vision panel. Out there was the black of
space and the glint of stars, the soft glow of distant Jupiter.
Greg Manning was hunched over the navigation controls, sharp eyes
watching the panorama of space.
Russ looked at him and grinned. On Greg's face there was a smile, but
about his eyes were lines of alert watchfulness and thought. Greg
Manning was in his proper role at the controls of a ship such as the
_Invincible_, a man who never stepped backward from danger, whose spirit
hungered for the vast stretches of void that lay between the worlds.
Russ leaned back, blowing smoke toward the high-arched control room
ceiling.
They had burned their bridges behind them. The laboratory back in the
mountains was destroyed. Locked against any possible attack by a sphere
of force until the tele-transport had lifted from it certain items of
equipment, it had been melted into a mass of molten metal that formed a
pool upon the mountain top, that ran in gushing, fiery ribbons down the
mountain side, flowing in gleaming curtains over precipices. It would
have been easier to have merely disintegrated in one bursting flash of
energy, but that would have torn apart the entire mountain range,
overwhelmed and toppled cities hundreds of miles away, dealt Earth a
staggering blow.
A skeleton crew had taken the _Comet_ back to Earth and landed it on
Greg's estate. Once again the tele-transport had reached out, wrapped
its fingers around the men who stepped from the little ship. In less
than the flash of a strobe light, they had been snatched back to the
_Invincible_, through a million miles of space, through the very walls
of the ship itself. One second they had been on Earth, the next second
they were in the control room of the _Invincible_, grinning, saluting
Greg Manning, trotting back to their quarters in the engine rooms.
* * * * *
Russ stared out at space, puffed at his pipe, considering.
A thousand years ago men had held what they called tournaments. Armored
knights rode out into the jousting grounds and broke their lances to
prove which was the better man. Today there was to be another
tournament. This ship was to be their charger, and the gauntlet had been
flung to Spencer Chambers and Interplanetary Power. And all of space was
to be the jousting grounds.
This was war. War without trappings, without fanfare, but bitter war
upon which depended the future of the Solar System. A war to break the
grip of steel that Interplanetary accumulators had gained upon the
planets, to shatter the grim dream of empire held by one man, a war for
the right to give to the people of the worlds a source of power that
would forever unshackle them.
Back in those days, a thousand years ago, men had built a system of
government that historians called the feudal system. By this system
certain men were called lords or barons and other titles. They held the
power of life and death over the men "under" them.
This was what Spencer Chambers was trying to do with the Solar
System ... what he would do if someone did not stop him.
* * * * *
Russ bit viciously on his pipe-stem.
The Earth, the Solar System, never could revert to that ancient way of
government. The proud people spawned on the Earth, swarming outward to
the other planets, must never have to bow their heads as minions to an
overlord.
The thrum of power was beating in his brain, the droning, humming power
from the engine rooms that would blast, once and forever, the last
threat of dictatorship upon any world. The power that would free a
people, that would help them on and up and outward to the great destiny
that was theirs.
And this had come because, wondering, groping, curiously, he had sought
to heat a slender thread of imperm wire within Force Field 348, because
another man had listened and had made available his fortune to continue
the experiments. Blind luck and human curiosity ... perhaps even the
madness of a human dream ... and from those things had come this great
ship, this mighty power, these many bulking pieces of equipment that
would perform wonders never guessed at less than a year ago.
Greg Manning swiveled his chair. "Well, Russ, we're ready to begin.
Let's get Wrail first."
Russ nodded silently, his mind still half full of fleeting thought.
Absent-mindedly he knocked out his pipe and pocketed it, swung around to
the manual of the televisor. His fingers reached out and tapped a
pattern.
Callisto appeared within the screen, leaped upward at them. Then the
surface of the frozen little world seemed to rotate swiftly and a dome
appeared.
The televisor dived through the dome, sped through the city, straight
for a penthouse apartment.
Ben Wrail sat slumped in a chair. A newspaper was crumpled at his feet.
In his lap lay a mangled dead cigar.
"Greg!" yelled Russ. "Greg, there's something wrong!"
Greg leaped forward, stared at the screen. Russ heard his smothered cry
of rage.
In Wrail's forehead was a tiny, neatly drilled hole from which a single
drop of blood oozed.
"Murdered!" exclaimed Russ.
"Yes, murdered," said Greg, and there was a sudden calmness in his
voice.
Russ grasped the televisor control. Ranthoor's streets ran beneath them,
curiously silent and deserted. Here and there lay bodies. A few shop
windows were smashed. But the only living that stirred was a dog that
slunk across the street and into the shadows of an alley.
Swiftly the televisor swung along the streets. Straight into the screen
clanked a marching detail of government police, herding before them a
half dozen prisoners. The men had their hands bound behind their backs,
but they walked with heads held high.
"Revolution," gasped Russ.
"Not a revolution. A purge. Stutsman is clearing the city of all who
might be dangerous to him. This will be happening on every other planet
where Chambers holds control."
Perspiration ran down Russ's forehead and dripped into his eyes as he
manipulated the controls.
"Stutsman is striking first," said Greg, calmly ... far too calmly.
"He's consolidating his position, possibly on the pretense that plots
have been discovered."
A few buildings were bombed. A line of bodies were crumpled at the foot
of a steel wall, marking the spot where men had been lined up and mowed
down with one sweeping blast from a heater.
Russ turned the television controls. "Let's see about Venus and Mars."
The scenes in Ranthoor were duplicated in Sandebar on Mars, in New
Chicago, the capital of Venus. Everywhere Stutsman had struck ...
everywhere the purge was wiping out in blood every person who might
revolt against the Chambers-dictated governments. Throughout the Solar
System violence was on the march, iron-shod boots trampling the rights
of free men to tighten the grip of Interplanetary.
* * * * *
In the control room of the _Invincible_ the two men stared at one
another.
"There's one man we need," said Greg. "One man, if he's still alive, and
I think he is."
"Who is that?" asked Russ.
"John Moore Mallory," said Greg.
"Where is he?"
"I don't know. He was imprisoned in Ranthoor, but Stutsman transferred
him some place else. Possibly to one of the prison fleet."
"If we had the records of the Callisto prison," suggested Russ, "we
could find out."
"If we had the records ..."
"We'll get them!" Russ said.
He swung back to the keyboard again.
A moment later the administration offices of the prison were on the
screen.
The two men searched the vision plate.
"The records are most likely in that vault," said Russ. "And the vault
is locked."
"Don't worry about the lock," snapped Greg. "Just bring the whole damn
thing here--vault and records and all."
Russ nodded grimly. His thumb tripped the tele-transport control and
from the engine rooms came a drone of power. In Ranthoor Prison, great
bands of force wrapped themselves around the vault, clutching it,
enfolding it within a sphere of power. Back in the _Invincible_ the
engines screamed and the vault was ripped out of the solid steel wall as
easily as a man might rip a button from his shirt.
_CHAPTER FIFTEEN_
John Moore Mallory sat on the single metal chair within his cell and
pressed his face against the tiny vision port. For hours he had sat
there, staring out into the blackness of space.
There was bitterness in John Moore Mallory's soul, a terrible and futile
bitterness. So long as he had remained within the Ranthoor prison, there
had always been a chance of escape. But now, aboard the penal ship,
there was no hope. Nothing but the taunting reaches of space, the
mocking pinpoints of the stars, the hooting laughter of the engines.
Sometimes he had thought he would go mad. The everlasting routine, the
meaningless march of hours. The work period, the sleep period ... the
work period, the sleep period ... endless monotony, an existence without
a purpose. Men buried alive in space.
"John Moore Mallory," said a voice.
Mallory heard, but he did not stir. An awful thought crossed his mind.
Now he was hearing voices calling his name!
"John Mallory," said the voice again.
Mallory slowly turned about and as he turned he started from his chair.
A man stood in the cell! A man he had never seen before, who had come
silently, for there had been no screech of opening door.
"You are John Moore Mallory, aren't you?" asked the man.
"Yes, I am Mallory. Who are you?"
"Gregory Manning."
"Gregory Manning," said Mallory wonderingly. "I've heard of you. You're
the man who rescued the Pluto Expedition. But why are you here? How did
you get in?"
"I came to take you away with me," said Greg. "Back to Callisto. Back to
any place you want to go."
Mallory flattened himself against the partition, his face white with
disbelief. "But I'm in a prison ship. I'm not free to go and come as I
please."
Greg chuckled. "You are free to go and come as you please from now on,"
he said. "Even prison ships can't hold you."
"You're mad," whispered Mallory. "Either you're mad or I am. You're a
dream. I'll wake up and find you gone."
Manning stood in silence, looking at the man. Mallory bore the marks of
prison on him. His eyes were haunted and his rugged face was pinched and
thin.
"Listen closely, Mallory," said Greg softly. "You aren't going mad and
I'm not mad. You aren't seeing things. You aren't hearing things. You're
actually talking to me."
* * * * *
There was no change in the other's face.
"Mallory," Greg went on, "I have what you've always needed--means of
generating almost unlimited energy at almost no cost, the secret of the
energy of matter. A secret that will smash Interplanetary, that will
free the Solar System from Spencer Chambers. But I can't make that
secret available to the people until Chambers is crushed, until I'm sure
that he can't take it from me. And to do that I need your help."
Mallory's face lost its expression of bewilderment, suddenly lighted
with realization. But his voice was harsh and bitter.
"You came too late. I can't help you. Remember, I'm in a prison ship
from which no one can escape. You have to do what you can ... you must
do what you can. But I can't be with you."
Manning strode forward. "You don't get the idea at all. I said I'd get
you out of here and I'm going to. I could pick up this ship and put it
wherever I wanted. But I don't want to. I just want you."
Mallory stared at him.
"Just don't be startled," said Greg. "Something will happen soon. Get
ready for it."
Feet drummed on the metal corridor outside.
"Hey, you, pipe down!" yelled the voice of the guard. "You know there's
no talking allowed now. Go to sleep."
"That's the guard," Mallory whispered fiercely. "They'll stop us."
Greg grinned viciously. "No, they won't."
* * * * *
The guard came into view through the grilled door.
"So it's you, Mallory ..." he began, stopping in amazement. "Hey, you!"
he shouted at Greg. "Who are you? How did you get in that cell?"
Greg flipped a hand in greeting. "Pleasant evening, isn't it?"
The guard grabbed for the door, but he did not reach the bars. Some
force stopped him six inches away. It could not be seen, could not be
felt, but his straining against it accomplished nothing.
"Mallory and I are leaving," Greg told the guard. "We don't like it
here. Too stuffy."
The guard lifted a whistle and blew a blast. Feet pounded outside. A
prisoner yelled from one of the cells. Another catcalled. Instantly the
ship was in an uproar. The convicts took up the yammering, shaking the
bars on their doors.
"Let's get started," Greg said to Mallory. "Hold tight."
Blackness engulfed Mallory. He felt a peculiar twisting wrench. And then
he was standing in the control room of a ship and Gregory Manning and
another man were smiling at him. White light poured down from a cluster
of globes. Somewhere in the ship engines purred with the hum of power.
The air was fresh and pure, making him realize how foul and stale the
air of the prison ship had been.
Greg held out his hand. "Welcome to our ship."
Mallory gripped his hand, blinking in the light. "Where am I?"
"You are on the _Invincible_, five million miles off Callisto."
"But were you here all the time?" asked Mallory. "Were you in my cell
back there or weren't you?"
"I was really in your cell," Greg assured him. "I could have just thrown
my image there, but I went there personally to get you. Russ Page, here,
sent me out. When I gave him the signal, he brought both of us back."
"I'm glad you're with us," Russ said. "Perhaps you'd like a cup of
coffee, something to eat."
Mallory stammered. "Why, I really would." He laughed. "Rations weren't
too good in the prison ship."
They sat down while Russ rang the galley for coffee and sandwiches.
Crisply, Greg informed Mallory of the situation.
"We want to start manufacturing these engines as soon as possible," he
explained, "but I haven't even dared to patent them. Chambers would
simply buy out the officials if I tried it on Earth, delay the patent
for a few days and then send through papers copied from ours. You know
what he'd do with it if he got the patent rights. He'd scrap it and the
old accumulator business would go on as always. If I tried it on any
other world, with any other government, he'd see that laws were passed
to block us. He'd probably instruct the courts to rule against the
manufacture of the engines on the grounds that they were dangerous."
Mallory's face was grave. "There's only one answer," he said. "With the
situation on the worlds, with this purge you told me about, there's only
one thing to do. We have to act at once. Every minute we wait gives
Stutsman just that much longer to tighten his hold."
"And that answer?" asked Russ.
"Revolution," said Mallory. "Simultaneous revolution in the Jovian
confederacy, on Mars and Venus. Once free, the planets will stay free
with your material energy engines. Spencer Chambers and his idea of
Solar System domination will be too late."
* * * * *
Greg's forehead was wrinkled in thought, his facial muscles tensed.
"First thing to do," he said, "is to contact all the men we can find ...
men we can rely on to help us carry out our plans. We'll need more
televisor machines, more teleport machines, some for use on Mars and
Venus, others for the Jovian moons. We will have to bring the men here
to learn to operate them. It'll take a few days. We'll get some men to
work on new machines right away."
He started to rise from his chair, but at that moment the coffee and
sandwiches arrived.
Greg grinned. "We may as well eat first."
Mallory looked grateful and tried to keep from wolfing the food. The
others pretended not to notice.
* * * * *
Grim hours followed, an unrelenting search over two planets and four
moons for men whom Mallory considered loyal to his cause--men willing to
risk their lives to throw off the yoke of Interplanetary.
They were hard to find. Many of them were dead, victims of the purge.
The others were in hiding and word of them was difficult to get.
But slowly, one by one, they were ferreted out, the plan explained to
them, and then, by means of the tele-transport, they were brought to the
_Invincible_.
Hour after hour men worked, stripped to their waists, in the glaring
inferno of terrible force fields, fashioning new television units. As
fast as the sets were constructed, they were placed in operation.
The work went faster than could be expected, yet it was maddeningly
slow.
For with the passing of each hour, Stutsman clamped tighter his iron
grip on the planets. Concentration camps were filled to overflowing.
Buildings were bombed and burned. Murders and executions were becoming
too common to be news.
Then suddenly there was a new development.
"Greg, Craven has found something!" Russ cried. "I can't get him!"
Supervising the installation of a new televisor set, Greg spun around.
"What's that?"
"Craven! I can't reach him. He's blocking me out!"
Greg helped, but the apparatus was unable to enter the Interplanetary
building in New York. Certain other portions of the city adjacent to the
building also were blanketed out. In all the Solar System, the
Interplanetary building was the only place they could not enter, except
the Sun itself.
Craven had developed a field from which their field shied off. The
televisor seemed to roll off it like a drop of mercury. That definitely
ended all spying on Craven and Chambers.
Russ mopped his brow, sucked at his dead pipe.
"Light penetrates it," he said. "Matter penetrates it, electricity, all
ordinary forces. But this field won't. It's ... well, whatever Craven
has is similarly dissimilar. The same thing of opposite nature. It
repels our field, but doesn't affect anything else. That means he has
analyzed our fields. We have Wilson to thank for this."
Greg nodded gravely. "There's just one thing to be thankful for," he
declared. "He probably isn't any nearer our energy than he was before.
But now we can't watch him. And that field of his shows that he has
tremendous power of some sort."
"We can't watch him, but we can follow him," corrected Russ. "He can't
shake us. None of them can. The mechanical shadow will take care of
that. I have one for Craven with a bit of 'bait' off his spectacles and
he'll keep those spectacles, never fear. He's blind as a bat without
them. And we can track Chambers with his ring."
"That's right," agreed Greg, "but we've got to speed up. Craven is
getting under way now. If he does this, he can do something else.
Something that will really hurt us. The man's clever ... too damn
clever."
_CHAPTER SIXTEEN_
A miracle came to pass in Ranthoor when a man for whom all hope had been
abandoned suddenly appeared within the city's streets. But he appeared
to be something not quite earthly, for he did not have the solidity of a
man. He was pale, like a wraith from out of space, and one could see
straight through him, yet he still had all the old mannerisms and
tricks.
In frightened, awe-stricken whispers the word was spread ... the spirit
of John Moore Mallory had come back to the city once again. He bulked
four times the height of a normal man and there was that singular
ghostliness about him. From where he had come, or how, or why, no one
seemed to know.
But when he reached the steps of the federation's administration
building and walked straight through a line of troopers that suddenly
massed to bar his way, and when he turned on those steps and spoke to
the people who had gathered, there was none to doubt that at last a sign
had come. The sign that now, if ever, was the time to avenge the purge.
Now the time to take vengeance for the blood that flowed in gutters, for
the throaty chortling of the flame guns that had snuffed out lives
against a broad steel wall.
Standing on the steps, shadowy but plainly visible, John Moore Mallory
talked to the people in the square below, and his voice was the voice
they remembered. They saw him toss his black mane of hair, they saw his
clenched fist raised in terrible anger, they heard the boom of the words
he spoke.
Like a shrilling alarm the words spread through the city, reverberating
from the dome, seeking out those who were in hiding. From every corner
of the city, from its deepest cellars and its darkest alleys, poured out
a mass of humanity that surrounded the capitol and blackened the square
and the converging streets with a mob that shrieked its hatred, bellowed
its anger.
"Power!" thundered the mighty shadow on the steps. "Power to burn! Power
to give away. Power to heat the dome, to work your mines, to drive your
spaceships!"
"Power!" answered the voice of the crowd. "Power!" It sounded like a
battle cry.
"No more accumulators," roared the towering image. "Never again need you
rely on Spencer Chambers for your power. Callisto is yours. Ranthoor is
yours."
The black crowd surged forward, reached the steps and started to climb,
wild cheers in their throat, the madness of victory in their eyes. Up
the steps came men with nothing but bare hands, screaming women, jeering
children.
Officers snapped orders at the troops that lined the steps, but the
troopers, staring into the awful, raging maw of that oncoming crowd,
dropped their guns and fled, back into the capitol building, with the
mob behind them, shrilling blood lust and long-awaited vengeance.
* * * * *
Out of the red and yellow wilderness of the deserts, a man came to
Sandebar on Mars. He had long been thought dead. The minions of the
government had announced that he was dead. But he had been in hiding for
six years.
His beard was long and gray, his eyes were curtained by hardship, his
white hair hung about his shoulders and he was clothed in the tattered
leather trappings of the spaceways.
But men remembered him.
Tom Brown had lead the last revolt against the Martian government, an
ill-starred revolt that ended almost before it started when the
troopers turned loose the heavy heaters and swept the streets with
washing waves of flame.
When he climbed to the base of a statue in Techor Park to address the
crowd that gathered, the police shouted for him to come down and he
disregarded them. They climbed the statue to reach him and their hands
went through him.
Tom Brown stood before the people, in plain view, and spoke, but he
wasn't there!
Other things happened in Sandebar that day. A voice spoke out of thin
air, a voice that told the people the reign of Interplanetary was over.
It told of a mighty new source of power. Power that would cost almost
nothing. Power that would make the accumulators unnecessary ... would
make them out of date. A voice that said the people need no longer
submit to the yoke of Spencer Chambers' government in order to obtain
the power they needed.
There was no one there ... no one visible at all. And yet that voice
went on and on. A great crowd gathered, listening, cheering. The police
tried to break it up and failed. The troops were ordered out and the
people fought them until the voice told them to disband peaceably and go
to their homes.
Throughout Mars it was the same.
In a dozen places in Sandebar the voice spoke. It spoke in a dozen
places, out of empty air, in Malacon and Alexon and Adebron.
Tom Brown, vanishing into the air after his speech was done, reappeared
a few minutes later in Adebron and there the police, warned of what had
happened in Sandebar, opened fire upon him when he stood on a park bench
to address the people. But the flames passed through and did not touch
him. Tom Brown, his long white beard covering his chest, his mad eyes
flashing, stood in the fiery blast that bellowed from the muzzles of the
flame rifles and calmly talked.
* * * * *
The chief of police at New Chicago, Venus, called the police
commissioner. "There's a guy out here in the park, just across the
street. He's preaching treason. He's telling the people to overthrow the
government."
In the ground glass the police commissioner's face grew purple.
"Arrest him," he ordered the chief. "Clap him in the jug. Do you have to
call me up every time one of those fiery-eyed boys climbs a soap box?
Run him in."
"I can't," said the chief.
The police commissioner seemed ready to explode. "You can't? Why the
hell not?"
"Well, you know that hill in the center of the park? Memorial Hill?"
"What has a hill got to do with it?" the commissioner roared.
"He's sitting on top of that hill. He's a thousand feet tall. His head
is way up in the sky and his voice is like thunder. How can you arrest
anybody like that?"
* * * * *
Everywhere in the System, revolt was flaming. New marching songs rolled
out between the worlds, wild marching songs that had the note of anger
in them. Weapons were brought out of hiding and polished. New standards
were raised in an ever-rising tide against oppression.
Freedom was on the march again. The right of a man to rule himself the
way he chose to rule. A new declaration of independence. A Solar Magna
Carta.
There were new leaders, led by the old leaders. Led by spirits that
marched across the sky. Led by voices that spoke out of the air. Led by
signs and symbols and a new-born courage and a great and a deep
conviction that right in the end would triumph.
* * * * *
Spencer Chambers glared at Ludwig Stutsman. "This is one time you went
too far."
"If you'd given me a free hand before, this wouldn't have been
necessary," Stutsman said. "But you were soft. You made me go easy when
I should have ground them down. You left the way open for all sorts of
plots and schemes and leaders to develop."
The two men faced one another, one the smooth, tawny lion, the other the
snarling wolf.
"You've built up hatred, Stutsman," Chambers said. "You are the most
hated man in the Solar System. And because of you, they hate me. That
wasn't my idea. I needed you because I needed an iron fist, but I needed
it to use judiciously. And you have been ruthless. You've used force
when conciliation was necessary."
Stutsman sneered openly. "Still that old dream of a benevolent
dictatorship. Still figuring yourself a little bronze god to be set up
in every household. A dictatorship can't be run that way. You have to
let them know you're boss."
Chambers was calm again. "Argument won't do us any good now. The damage
is done. Revolt is flaming through all the worlds. We have to do
something."
He looked at Craven, who was slouched in a chair beside the desk across
which he and Stutsman faced each other.
"Can you help us, doctor?" he asked.
Craven shrugged. "Perhaps," he said acidly. "If I could only be left to
my work undisturbed, instead of being dragged into these stupid
conferences, I might be able to do something."
"You already have, haven't you?" asked Chambers.
"Very little. I've been able to blank out the televisor that Manning and
Page are using, but that is all."
"Do you have any idea where Manning and Page are?"
"How could I know?" Craven asked. "Somewhere in space."
"They're at the bottom of this," snarled Stutsman. "Their damned tricks
and propaganda."
"We know they're at the bottom of it," said Craven. "That's no news to
us. If it weren't for them, we wouldn't have this trouble now, despite
your bungling. But that doesn't help us any. With this new discovery of
mine I have shielded this building from their observation. They can't
spy on us any more. But that's as far as I've got."
"They televised the secret meeting of the emergency council when it met
in Satellite City on Ganymede the other day," said Chambers. "The whole
Jovian confederacy watched and listened to that meeting, heard our
secret war plans, for fully ten minutes before the trick was discovered.
Couldn't we use your shield to prevent such a situation again?"
"Better still," suggested Stutsman, "let's shield the whole satellite.
Without Manning's ghostly leaders, this revolt would collapse of its own
weight."
Craven shook his head. "It takes fifty tons of accumulators to build up
that field, and a ton of fuel a day to maintain it. Just for this
building alone. It would be impossible to shield a whole planet, an
entire moon."
* * * * *
"Any progress on your collector field?" asked Chambers.
"Some," Craven admitted. "I'll know in a day or two."
"That would give us something with which to fight Manning and Page,
wouldn't it?"
"Yes," agreed Craven. "It would be something to fight them with. If I
can develop that collector field, we would be able to utilize every
radiation in space, from the heat wave down through the cosmics. Within
the Solar System, our power would be absolutely limitless. Your
accumulators depend for their power storage upon just one radiation ...
heat. But with this idea I have you'd use all types of radiations."
"You say you could even put the cosmics to work?" asked Chambers.
Craven nodded. "If I can do anything at all with the field, I can."
"How?" demanded Stutsman.
"By breaking them up, you fool. Smash the short, high-powered waves into
a lot of longer, lower-powered waves." Craven swung back to face
Chambers. "But don't count on it," he warned. "I haven't done it yet."
"You have to do it," Chambers insisted.
Craven rose from his chair, his blue eyes blazing angrily behind the
heavy lenses. "How often must I tell you that you cannot hurry
scientific investigation? You have to try and try ... follow one tiny
clue to another tiny clue. You have to be patient. You have to hope. But
you cannot force the work."
He strode from the room, slammed the door behind him.
Chambers turned slowly in his chair to face Stutsman. His gray eyes
bored into the wolfish face.
"And now," he suggested, "suppose you tell me just why you did it."
Stutsman's lips curled. "I suppose you would rather I had allowed those
troublemakers to go ahead, consolidate their plans. There was only one
thing to do--root them out, liquidate them. I did it."
"You chose a poor time," said Chambers softly. "You would have to do
something like this, just at the time when Manning is lurking around the
Solar System somewhere, carrying enough power to wipe us off the face of
the Earth if he wanted to."
"That's why I did it," protested Stutsman. "I knew Manning was around. I
was afraid he'd start something, so I beat him to it. I thought it would
throw a scare into the people, make them afraid to follow Manning when
he acted."
* * * * *
"You have a low opinion of the human race, don't you?" Chambers said.
"You think you can beat them into a mire of helplessness and fear."
Chambers rose from his chair, pounded his desk for emphasis.
"But you can't do it, Stutsman. Men have tried it before you, from the
very dawn of history. You can destroy their homes and kill their
children. You can burn them at the stake or in the electric chair, hang
them or space-walk them or herd them into gas chambers. You can drive
them like cattle into concentration camps, you can keep the torture
racks bloody, but you can't break them.
"Because the people always survive. Their courage is greater than the
courage of any one man or group of men. They always reach the man who
has oppressed them, they always tear him down from the place he sits,
and they do not deal gently with him when they do. In the end the
people always win."
Chambers reached across the desk and caught Stutsman by the slack of the
shirt. A twist of his hand tightened the fabric around Stutsman's neck.
The financier thrust his face close to the wolfish scowl. "That is what
is going to happen to you and me. We'll go down in history as just a
couple of damn fools who tried to rule and couldn't make the grade.
Thanks to you and your damned stupidity. You and your blood purges!"
Patches of anger burned on Stutsman's cheeks. His eyes glittered and his
lips were white. But his whisper was bitter mockery. "Maybe we should
have coddled and humored them. Made them just so awful happy that big
bad old Interplanetary had them. So they could have set up little bronze
images of you in their homes. So you could have been sort of a solar
god!"
"I still think it would have been the better way." Chambers flung
Stutsman from him with a straight-armed push. The man reeled and
staggered across the carpeted floor. "Get out of my sight!"
Stutsman straightened his shirt, turned and left.
Chambers slumped into his chair, his hands grasping the arms on either
side of his great body, his eyes staring out through the window from
which flooded the last rays of the afternoon Sun.
* * * * *
Drums pounded in his brain ... the drums of rebellion out in space, of
rebellion on those other worlds ... drums that were drowning out and
shattering forever the dream that he had woven. He had wanted economic
dictatorship ... not the cold, passionless, terrible dictatorship that
Stutsman typified ... but one that would bring peace and prosperity and
happiness to the Solar System.
He closed his eyes and thought. Snatches of ambition, snatches of
hopes ... but it was useless to think, for the drums and the imagined
shouting drowned out his thoughts.
Mankind didn't give a damn for good business administration, nor a hoot
for prosperity or peace or happiness. Liberty and the right to rule, the
right to go risk one's neck ... to climb a mountain or cross a desert or
explore a swamp, the right to aim one's sights at distant stars, to
fling a taunting challenge into the teeth of space, to probe with clumsy
fingers and force nature to lay bare her secrets ... that was what
mankind wanted. That was what those men out on Mars and Venus and in
the Jovian worlds were fighting for. Not against Spencer Chambers or
Ludwig Stutsman or Interplanetary Power, but for the thing that drove
man on and made of him a flame that others might follow. Fighting for a
heritage that was first expressed when the first man growled at the
entrance to his cave and dared the world to take it from him.
Spencer Chambers closed his eyes and rocked back and forth in the
tilting office chair.
It had been a good fight, a hard fight. He had had a lot of fun out of
it. But he was licked, after all these years. He had held the biggest
dream of any man who ever lived. Alexander and Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin
and those other fellows had been pikers alongside of Spencer Chambers.
They had only aimed at Earthly conquest while he had reached out to grab
at all the worlds. But by heaven, he'd almost made it!
A door grated open.
"Chambers!" said a voice.
His feet hit the floor with a thud and he sat stiff and staring at the
figure in the door.
It was Craven and the man was excited. His glasses were slid far down on
his nose, his hair was standing on end, his tie was all awry.
"I have it!" Craven whooped. "I have it at last!"
Hope clutched at Chambers, but he was almost afraid to speak.
"Have what?" he whispered tensely.
"The collector field! It was under my nose all the time, but I didn't
see it!"
Chambers was out of his chair and striding across the room. A tumult
buzzed within his skull.
Licked? Hell, he hadn't even started! He'd win yet. He'd teach the
people to revolt! He'd run Manning and Page out to the end of space and
push them through!
_CHAPTER SEVENTEEN_
It was a weird revolution. There were few battles, little blood shed.
There seemed to be no secret plots. There were no skulking leaders, no
passwords, nothing that in former years had marked rebellion against
tyranny.
It was a revolution carried out with utter boldness. Secret police were
helpless, for it was not a secret revolution. The regular police and the
troopers were helpless because the men they wanted to arrest were
shadows that flitter here and there ... large and substantial shadows,
but impossible to seize and imprison.
Every scheme that was hatched within the government circles was known
almost at once to the ghostly leaders who stalked the land. Police
detachments, armed with warrants for the arrests of men who had
participated in some action which would stamp them as active rebels,
found the suspects absent when they broke down the doors. Someone had
warned them. Troops, hurried to points where riots had broken out,
arrived to find peaceful scenes, but with evidence of recent battle. The
rioters had been warned, had made their getaway.
When the rebels struck it was always at the most opportune time, when
the government was off balance or off guard.
In the first day of the revolt, Ranthoor fell when the maddened
populace, urged on by the words of a shadowy John Moore Mallory, charged
the federation buildings. The government fled, leaving all records
behind, to Satellite City on Ganymede.
In the first week three Martian cities fell, but Sandebar, the capital,
still held out. On Venus, Radium City was taken by the rebels within
twenty-four hours after the first call to revolt had rung across the
worlds, but New Chicago, the seat of government, still was in the
government's hands, facing a siege.
Government propagandists spread the word that the material energy
engines were not safe. Reports were broadcast that on at least two
occasions the engines had blown up, killing the men who operated them.
But this propaganda failed to gain
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