"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."