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.