"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 credence, for in the cities that were
in the rebel hands, technicians were at work manufacturing and setting
up the material engines. Demonstrations were given. The people saw them,
saw what enormous power they developed.
* * * * *
Russ Page stared incredulously at the television screen. It seemed to be
shifting back and forth. One second it held the distorted view of
Satellite City on Ganymede, and the next second the view of jumbled, icy
desert somewhere outside the city.
"Look here, Greg," he said. "Something's wrong."
Greg Manning turned away from the calculator where he had been working
and stared at the screen.
"How long has it been acting that way?" he asked.
"Just started," said Russ.
Greg straightened and glanced down the row of television machines. Some
of them were dead, their switches closed, but on the screens of many of
the others was the same effect as on this machine. Their operators were
working frustratedly at the controls, trying to focus the image, bring
it into sharp relief.
"Can't seem to get a thing, sir," said one of the men. "I was working on
the fueling station out on Io, and the screen just went haywire."
"Mine seems to be all right," said another man. "I've had it on Sandebar
for the last couple of hours and there's nothing wrong."
A swift check revealed one fact. The machines, when trained on the
Jovian worlds, refused to function. Anywhere else in space, however,
they worked perfectly.
Russ stoked and lit his pipe, snapped off his machine and swung around
in the operator's chair.
"Somebody's playing hell with us out around Jupiter," he stated calmly.
"I've been expecting something like this," said Greg. "I have been
afraid of this ever since Craven blanketed us out of the Interplanetary
building."
* * * * *
"He really must have something this time," Russ agreed. "He's blanketing
out the entire Jovian system. There's a space field of low intensity
surrounding all of Jupiter, enclosing all the moons. He keeps shifting
the intensity so that, even though we can force our way through his
field, the irregular variations make it impossible to line up anything.
It works, in principle, just as effectively as if we couldn't get
through at all."
Greg whistled soundlessly through suddenly bared teeth.
"That takes power," he said, "and I'm afraid Craven has it. Power to
burn."
"The collector field?" asked Russ.
Greg nodded. "A field that sucks in radiant energy. Free energy that he
just reaches out and grabs. And it doesn't depend on the Sun alone. It
probably makes use of every type of radiation in all of space."
Russ slumped in his chair, smoking, his forehead wrinkled in thought.
"If that's what he's got," he finally declared, "he's going to be hard
to crack. He can suck in any radiant vibration form, any space
vibration. He can shift them around, break them down and build them up.
He can discharge them, direct them. He's got a vibration plant that's
the handiest little war machine that ever existed."
Greg suddenly wheeled and walked to a wall cabinet. From it he took a
box and, opening it, lifted out a tiny mechanism.
He chuckled deep in his throat. "The mechanical shadow. The little
machine that always tells us where Craven is--as long as he's wearing
his glasses."
"He always wears them," said Russ crisply. "He's blind as a bat without
them."
Greg set the machine down on the table. "When we find Craven, we'll find
the contraption that's blanketing Jupiter and its moons."
Dials spun and needles quivered. Rapidly Russ jotted down the readings
on a sheet of paper. At the calculator, he tapped keys, depressed the
activator. The machine hummed and snarled and chuckled.
Russ glanced at the result imprinted on the paper roll.
"Craven is out near Jupiter," he announced. "About 75,000 miles distant
from its surface, in a plane normal to the Sun's rays."
"A spaceship," suggested Greg.