"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."