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.