TheInvinciblehung in space, an empty, airless hull, the largest thing afloat.
Chartered freighters, leaving their ports from distant parts of the Earth, had converged upon her hours before, had unloaded crated apparatus, storing it in the yawning hull. Then they had departed.
Now the sturdy little space-yacht,Comet, was towing the great ship out into space, 500,000 miles beyond the orbit of the Moon. Slowly the hull was being taken farther and farther away from possible discovery.
Work on the installation of the apparatus had started almost as soon as theComethad first tugged at the ponderous mass. Leaving only a skeleton crew in charge of theComet, the rest of the selected crew had begun the assembly of the mighty machines which would transform theInvincibleinto a thing of unimaginable power and speed.
The doors were closed and sealed and the air, already stored in the ship's tanks, was released. The slight acceleration of theComet'stowing served to create artificial weight for easier work, but not enough to handicap the shifting of the heavier pieces of apparatus. An electric cable was run back from the little yacht and theInvincibletook her first breath of life.
The work advanced rapidly, for every man was more than a mere engineer or spacebuster. They were a selected crew, the men who had helped to make the name of Gregory Manning famous throughout the Solar System.
First the engines were installed, then the two groups of five massive power plants and the single smaller engine as an auxiliary supply plant for the light, heat, air.
The accumulators of theCometwere drained in a single tremendous surge and the auxiliary generator started. It in turn awoke to life the other power plants, to leave them sleeping, idling, but ready for instant use to develop power such as man never before had dreamed of holding and molding to his will.
Then, with the gigantic tools these engines supplied ... tools of pure force and strange space fields ... the work was rapidly completed. The power boards were set in place, welded in position by a sudden furious blast of white hot metal and as equally sudden freezing, to be followed by careful heating and recooling till the beryl-steel reached its maximum strength. Over the hull swarmed spacesuited men, using that strange new power, heat-treating the stubborn metal in a manner never before possible.
The generators were charging the atoms of the ship's beryl-steel hide with the same hazy force that had trapped and held the gangster ship in a mighty vise. Thus charged, no material thing could penetrate them. The greatest meteor would be crushed to drifting dust without so much as scarring that wall of mighty force ... meteors traveling with a speed and penetrative power that no gun-hurled projectile could ever hope to attain.
Riding under her own power, driven by the concentration of gravitational lines, impregnable to all known forces, containing within her hull the secrets of many strange devices, theInvinciblewheeled in space.
Russell Pagelounged in a chair before the control manual of the tele-transport machine. He puffed placidly at his pipe and looked out through the great sweep of the vision panel. Out there was the black of space and the glint of stars, the soft glow of distant Jupiter.
Greg Manning was hunched over the navigation controls,sharp eyes watching the panorama of space.
Russ looked at him and grinned. On Greg's face there was a smile, but about his eyes were lines of alert watchfulness and thought. Greg Manning was in his proper role at the controls of a ship such as theInvincible, a man who never stepped backward from danger, whose spirit hungered for the vast stretches of void that lay between the worlds.
Russ leaned back, blowing smoke toward the high-arched control room ceiling.
They had burned their bridges behind them. The laboratory back in the mountains was destroyed. Locked against any possible attack by a sphere of force until the tele-transport had lifted from it certain items of equipment, it had been melted into a mass of molten metal that formed a pool upon the mountain top, that ran in gushing, fiery ribbons down the mountain side, flowing in gleaming curtains over precipices. It would have been easier to have merely disintegrated in one bursting flash of energy, but that would have torn apart the entire mountain range, overwhelmed and toppled cities hundreds of miles away, dealt Earth a staggering blow.
A skeleton crew had taken theCometback to Earth and landed it on Greg's estate. Once again the tele-transport had reached out, wrapped its fingers around the men who stepped from the little ship. In less than the flash of a strobe light, they had been snatched back to theInvincible, through a million miles of space, through the very walls of the ship itself. One second they had been on Earth, the next second they were in the control room of theInvincible, grinning, saluting Greg Manning, trotting back to their quarters in the engine rooms.
Russstared out at space, puffed at his pipe, considering.
A thousand years ago men had held what they called tournaments. Armored knights rode out into the jousting grounds and broke their lances to prove which was the better man. Today there was to be another tournament. This ship was to be their charger, and the gauntlet had been flung to Spencer Chambers and Interplanetary Power. And all of space was to be the jousting grounds.
This was war. War without trappings, without fanfare, but bitter war upon which depended the future of the Solar System. A war to break the grip of steel that Interplanetary accumulators had gained upon the planets, to shatter the grim dream of empireheld by one man, a war for the right to give to the people of the worlds a source of power that would forever unshackle them.
Back in those days, a thousand years ago, men had built a system of government that historians called the feudal system. By this system certain men were called lords or barons and other titles. They held the power of life and death over the men "under" them.
This was what Spencer Chambers was trying to do with the Solar System ... what he would do if someone did not stop him.
Russbit viciously on his pipe-stem.
The Earth, the Solar System, never could revert to that ancient way of government. The proud people spawned on the Earth, swarming outward to the other planets, must never have to bow their heads as minions to an overlord.
The thrum of power was beating in his brain, the droning, humming power from the engine rooms that would blast, once and forever, the last threat of dictatorship upon any world. The power that would free a people, that would help them on and up and outward to the great destiny that was theirs.
And this had come because, wondering, groping, curiously, he had sought to heat a slender thread of imperm wire within Force Field 348, because another man had listened and had made available his fortune to continue the experiments. Blind luck and human curiosity ... perhaps even the madness of a human dream ... and from those things had come this great ship, this mighty power, these many bulking pieces of equipment that would perform wonders never guessed at less than a year ago.
Greg Manning swiveled his chair. "Well, Russ, we're ready to begin. Let's get Wrail first."
Russ nodded silently, his mind still half full of fleeting thought. Absent-mindedly he knocked out his pipe and pocketed it, swung around to the manual of the televisor. His fingers reached out and tapped a pattern.
Callisto appeared within the screen, leaped upward at them. Then the surface of the frozen little world seemed to rotate swiftly and a dome appeared.
The televisor dived through the dome, sped through the city, straight for a penthouse apartment.
Ben Wrail sat slumped in a chair. A newspaper was crumpled at his feet. In his lap lay a mangled dead cigar.
"Greg!" yelled Russ. "Greg, there's something wrong!"
Greg leaped forward, stared atthe screen. Russ heard his smothered cry of rage.
In Wrail's forehead was a tiny, neatly drilled hole from which a single drop of blood oozed.
"Murdered!" exclaimed Russ.
"Yes, murdered," said Greg, and there was a sudden calmness in his voice.
Russ grasped the televisor control. Ranthoor's streets ran beneath them, curiously silent and deserted. Here and there lay bodies. A few shop windows were smashed. But the only living that stirred was a dog that slunk across the street and into the shadows of an alley.
Swiftly the televisor swung along the streets. Straight into the screen clanked a marching detail of government police, herding before them a half dozen prisoners. The men had their hands bound behind their backs, but they walked with heads held high.
"Revolution," gasped Russ.
"Not a revolution. A purge. Stutsman is clearing the city of all who might be dangerous to him. This will be happening on every other planet where Chambers holds control."
Perspiration ran down Russ's forehead and dripped into his eyes as he manipulated the controls.
"Stutsman is striking first," said Greg, calmly ... far too calmly. "He's consolidating his position, possibly on the pretense that plots have been discovered."
A few buildings were bombed. A line of bodies were crumpled at the foot of a steel wall, marking the spot where men had been lined up and mowed down with one sweeping blast from a heater.
Russ turned the television controls. "Let's see about Venus and Mars."
The scenes in Ranthoor were duplicated in Sandebar on Mars, in New Chicago, the capital of Venus. Everywhere Stutsman had struck ... everywhere the purge was wiping out in blood every person who might revolt against the Chambers-dictated governments. Throughout the Solar System violence was on the march, iron-shod boots trampling the rights of free men to tighten the grip of Interplanetary.
Inthe control room of theInvinciblethe two men stared at one another.
"There's one man we need," said Greg. "One man, if he's still alive, and I think he is."
"Who is that?" asked Russ.
"John Moore Mallory," said Greg.
"Where is he?"
"I don't know. He was imprisoned in Ranthoor, but Stutsman transferred him some place else. Possibly to one of the prison fleet."
"If we had the records of the Callisto prison," suggested Russ, "we could find out."
"If we had the records ..."
"We'll get them!" Russ said.
He swung back to the keyboard again.
A moment later the administration offices of the prison were on the screen.
The two men searched the vision plate.
"The records are most likely in that vault," said Russ. "And the vault is locked."
"Don't worry about the lock," snapped Greg. "Just bring the whole damn thing here—vault and records and all."
Russ nodded grimly. His thumb tripped the tele-transport control and from the engine rooms came a drone of power. In Ranthoor Prison, great bands of force wrapped themselves around the vault, clutching it, enfolding it within a sphere of power. Back in theInvinciblethe engines screamed and the vault was ripped out of the solid steel wall as easily as a man might rip a button from his shirt.
John Moore Mallorysat on the single metal chair within his cell and pressed his face against the tiny vision port. For hours he had sat there, staring out into the blackness of space.
There was bitterness in John Moore Mallory's soul, a terrible and futile bitterness. So long as he had remained within the Ranthoor prison, there had always been a chance of escape. But now, aboard the penal ship, there was no hope. Nothing but the taunting reaches of space, the mocking pinpoints of the stars, the hooting laughter of the engines.
Sometimes he had thought he would go mad. The everlasting routine, the meaningless march of hours. The work period, the sleep period ... the work period, the sleep period ... endless monotony, an existence without a purpose. Men buried alive in space.
"John Moore Mallory," said a voice.
Mallory heard, but he did not stir. An awful thought crossedhis mind. Now he was hearing voices calling his name!
"John Mallory," said the voice again.
Mallory slowly turned about and as he turned he started from his chair.
A man stood in the cell! A man he had never seen before, who had come silently, for there had been no screech of opening door.
"You are John Moore Mallory, aren't you?" asked the man.
"Yes, I am Mallory. Who are you?"
"Gregory Manning."
"Gregory Manning," said Mallory wonderingly. "I've heard of you. You're the man who rescued the Pluto Expedition. But why are you here? How did you get in?"
"I came to take you away with me," said Greg. "Back to Callisto. Back to any place you want to go."
Mallory flattened himself against the partition, his face white with disbelief. "But I'm in a prison ship. I'm not free to go and come as I please."
Greg chuckled. "You are free to go and come as you please from now on," he said. "Even prison ships can't hold you."
"You're mad," whispered Mallory. "Either you're mad or I am. You're a dream. I'll wake up and find you gone."
Manning stood in silence, looking at the man. Mallory bore the marks of prison on him. His eyes were haunted and his rugged face was pinched and thin.
"Listen closely, Mallory," said Greg softly. "You aren't going mad and I'm not mad. You aren't seeing things. You aren't hearing things. You're actually talking to me."
Therewas no change in the other's face.
"Mallory," Greg went on, "I have what you've always needed—means of generating almost unlimited energy at almost no cost, the secret of the energy of matter. A secret that will smash Interplanetary, that will free the Solar System from Spencer Chambers. But I can't make that secret available to the people until Chambers is crushed, until I'm sure that he can't take it from me. And to do that I need your help."
Mallory's face lost its expression of bewilderment, suddenly lighted with realization. But his voice was harsh and bitter.
"You came too late. I can't help you. Remember, I'm in a prison ship from which no one can escape. You have to do what you can ... you must do what you can. But I can't be with you."
Manning strode forward. "You don't get the idea at all. I saidI'd get you out of here and I'm going to. I could pick up this ship and put it wherever I wanted. But I don't want to. I just want you."
Mallory stared at him.
"Just don't be startled," said Greg. "Something will happen soon. Get ready for it."
Feet drummed on the metal corridor outside.
"Hey, you, pipe down!" yelled the voice of the guard. "You know there's no talking allowed now. Go to sleep."
"That's the guard," Mallory whispered fiercely. "They'll stop us."
Greg grinned viciously. "No, they won't."
Theguard came into view through the grilled door.
"So it's you, Mallory ..." he began, stopping in amazement. "Hey, you!" he shouted at Greg. "Who are you? How did you get in that cell?"
Greg flipped a hand in greeting. "Pleasant evening, isn't it?"
The guard grabbed for the door, but he did not reach the bars. Some force stopped him six inches away. It could not be seen, could not be felt, but his straining against it accomplished nothing.
"Mallory and I are leaving," Greg told the guard. "We don't like it here. Too stuffy."
The guard lifted a whistle and blew a blast. Feet pounded outside. A prisoner yelled from one of the cells. Another catcalled. Instantly the ship was in an uproar. The convicts took up the yammering, shaking the bars on their doors.
"Let's get started," Greg said to Mallory. "Hold tight."
Blackness engulfed Mallory. He felt a peculiar twisting wrench. And then he was standing in the control room of a ship and Gregory Manning and another man were smiling at him. White light poured down from a cluster of globes. Somewhere in the ship engines purred with the hum of power. The air was fresh and pure, making him realize how foul and stale the air of the prison ship had been.
Greg held out his hand. "Welcome to our ship."
Mallory gripped his hand, blinking in the light. "Where am I?"
"You are on theInvincible, five million miles off Callisto."
"But were you here all the time?" asked Mallory. "Were you in my cell back there or weren't you?"
"I was really in your cell," Greg assured him. "I could have just thrown my image there, but I went there personally to get you. Russ Page, here, sent me out. When I gave him the signal,he brought both of us back."
"I'm glad you're with us," Russ said. "Perhaps you'd like a cup of coffee, something to eat."
Mallory stammered. "Why, I really would." He laughed. "Rations weren't too good in the prison ship."
They sat down while Russ rang the galley for coffee and sandwiches.
Crisply, Greg informed Mallory of the situation.
"We want to start manufacturing these engines as soon as possible," he explained, "but I haven't even dared to patent them. Chambers would simply buy out the officials if I tried it on Earth, delay the patent for a few days and then send through papers copied from ours. You know what he'd do with it if he got the patent rights. He'd scrap it and the old accumulator business would go on as always. If I tried it on any other world, with any other government, he'd see that laws were passed to block us. He'd probably instruct the courts to rule against the manufacture of the engines on the grounds that they were dangerous."
Mallory's face was grave. "There's only one answer," he said. "With the situation on the worlds, with this purge you told me about, there's only one thing to do. We have to act at once. Every minute we wait gives Stutsman just that much longer to tighten his hold."
"And that answer?" asked Russ.
"Revolution," said Mallory. "Simultaneous revolution in the Jovian confederacy, on Mars and Venus. Once free, the planets will stay free with your material energy engines. Spencer Chambers and his idea of Solar System domination will be too late."
Greg'sforehead was wrinkled in thought, his facial muscles tensed.
"First thing to do," he said, "is to contact all the men we can find ... men we can rely on to help us carry out our plans. We'll need more televisor machines, more teleport machines, some for use on Mars and Venus, others for the Jovian moons. We will have to bring the men here to learn to operate them. It'll take a few days. We'll get some men to work on new machines right away."
He started to rise from his chair, but at that moment the coffee and sandwiches arrived.
Greg grinned. "We may as well eat first."
Mallory looked grateful and tried to keep from wolfing the food. The others pretended not to notice.
Grimhours 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 theInvincible.
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 hisshows 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."
A miraclecame 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, ifever, 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.
Outof 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 startedwhen 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.
Thechief 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. "Youcan'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?"
Everywherein 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 Chambersglared 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?" heasked.
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."
"Anyprogress 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.
Craven nodded. "If Ican do anything at all with the field, I can."
"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."
"Youhave 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 theydo 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.
Drumspounded 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 Marsand 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!
Itwas 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 topoints 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 Pagestared 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 ofhours 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."
"Hereally 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 downthe 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.
Russ nodded. "That's the only answer."
The two men looked at one another.
"That's something we can get hold of," said Greg.
He walked to the ship controls and lowered himself into the pilot's chair. A hand came out and hauled back a lever.
TheInvinciblemoved.
From the engine rooms came the whine of the gigantic power plant as it built up and maintained the gravity concentration center suddenly created in front of the ship.
Russ, standing beside Greg at the control panel, looked out into space and marveled. They were flashing through space, their speed building up at a breath-taking rate, yet they had no real propulsion power. The discovery of the gravity concentrator had outdated such a method of driving a spaceship. Instead, they were falling, hurtling downward into the yawning maw of an artificial gravity field. And such a method made for speed, terrible speed.
Jupiter seemed to leap at them. It became a great crimson and yellow ball that filled almost half the vision plate.
TheInvincible'sspeed was slacking off, slower and slower, until it barely crawled in comparison to its former speed.
Slowly they circled Jupiter's great girth, staring out of the vision port for a sight of Craven's ship. They were nearing the position the little mechanical shadow had indicated.
"There it is," said Russ suddenly, almost breathlessly.
Far out in space, tiny, almost like a dust mote against the great bulk of the monster planet, rode a tiny light. Slowly theInvinciblecrawled inward. The mote of light became a gleaming silver ship, a mighty ship—one that was fully as large as theInvincible!
"That's it all right," said Greg. "They're lying behind a log out here raising hell with our television apparatus. Maybe we better tickle them a little bit and see what they have."
Rising from the control board, he went to another control panel. Russ remained standing in front of the vision plate, staring downat the ship out in space.
Behind him came a shrill howl from the power plant. TheInvinciblestaggered slightly. A beam of deep indigo lashed across space, a finger suddenly jabbing at the other ship.
Space was suddenly colored, for thousands of miles, as the beam struck Craven's ship and seemed to explode in a blast of dazzling indigo light. The ship reeled under the impact of the blow, reeled and weaved in space as the beam struck it and delivered to it the mighty power of the screaming engines back in the engine room.
"What happened?" Greg screamed above the roar.
Russ shrugged his shoulders. "You jarred him a little. Pushed him through space for several hundred miles. Made him know something had hit him, but it didn't seem to do any damage."
"That was pure cosmic I gave him! Five billion horsepower—and it just staggered him!"
"He's got a space lens that absorbs the energy," said Russ. "The lens concentrates it and pours it into a receiving chamber, probably a huge photo-cell. Nobody yet has burned out one of those things on a closed circuit."
Greg wrinkled his brow, perplexed. "What he must have is a special field of some sort that lowers the wave-length and the intensity. He's getting natural cosmics all the time and taking care of them."
"That wouldn't be much of a trick," Russ pointed out. "But when he takes care of cosmics backed by five billion horsepower ... that's something else!"
Greg grinned wickedly. "I'm going to hand him a long heat radiation. If his field shortens that any, he'll have radio beam and that will blow photo-cells all to hell."
He stabbed viciously at the keys on the board and once again the shrill howl of the engines came from the rear of the ship. A lance of red splashed out across space and touched the other ship. Again space was lit, this time with a crimson glow.
Russshook his head. "Nothing doing."
Greg sat down and looked at Russ. "Funny thing about this. They just sat there and let us throw two charges at them, took everything we gave them and never tried to hand it back."
"Maybe they haven't anything to hand us," Russ suggested hopefully.
"They must have. Craven wouldn't take to space with just a purely defensive weapon. He knew we'd find him and he'd have a fight on his hands."
Russ found his pipe was dead.Snapping his lighter, he applied flame to the blackened tobacco. Walking slowly to the wall cabinet, he lifted two other boxes out, set them on the table and took from them two other mechanical shadows. He turned them on and leaned close, watching the spinning dials, the quivering needles.
"Greg," he whispered, "Chambers and Stutsman are there in that ship with Craven! Look, their shadows register identical with the one that spotted Craven."
"I suspected as much," Greg replied. "We got the whole pack cornered out here. If we can just get rid of them, the whole war would be won in one stroke."
Russ lifted a stricken face from the row of tiny mechanisms. "This is our big chance. We may never get it again. The next hour could decide who is going to win."
Greg rose from the chair and stood before the control board. Grimly he punched a series of keys. The engines howled again. Greg twisted a dial and the howl rose into a shrill scream.
From theInvincibleanother beam lashed out ... another and another. Space was speared with beam after beam hurtling from the great ship.
Swiftly the beams went through the range of radiation, through radio and short radio, infra-red, visible light, ultra-violet, X-ray, the gammas and the cosmics—a terrific flood of billions of horsepower.
Craven's ship buckled and careened under the lashing impacts of the bombardment, but it seemed unhurt!
Greg's face was bleaker than usual as he turned from the board to look at Russ.
"We've used everything we have," he said, "and he's stopped them all. We can't touch him."
Russshivered. The control room suddenly seemed chilly with a frightening kind of cold.
"He's carrying photo-cells and several thousand tons of accumulator stacks. Not much power left in them. He could pour a billion horsepower into them for hours and still have room for more."
Greg nodded wearily. "All we've been doing is feeding him."
The engines were humming quietly now, singing the low song of power held in leash.
But then they screamed like a buzz saw biting into an iron-hard stick of white oak. Screamed in a single, frightful agony as they threw into the protecting wall that enclosed theInvincibleall the power they could develop.
The air of the ship was instantaneously charged with ahazy, bluish glow, and the sharp, stinging odor of ozone filled the ship.
Outside, an enormous burst of blue-white flame splashed and spattered around theInvincible. Living lightning played in solid, snapping sheets around the vision port and ran in trickling blazing fire across the plates.
Russ cried out and backed away, holding his arm before his eyes. It was as if he had looked into a nova of energy exploding before his eyes.
In the instant the scream died and the splash of terrific fire had vanished. Only a rapidly dying glow remained.
"What was it?" asked Russ dazedly. "What happened? Ten engines every one of them capable of over five billion horsepower and every one of them screaming!"
"Craven," said Greg grimly. "He let us have everything he had. He simply drained his accumulator stacks and threw it all into our face. But he's done now. That was his only shot. He'll have to build up power now and that will take a while. But we couldn't have taken much more."
"Stalemate," said Russ. "We can't hurt him, he can't hurt us."
"Not by a damn sight," declared Greg. "I still have a trick or two in mind."
He tried them. From theInvinciblea fifty-billion-horsepower bolt of living light and fire sprang out as all ten engines thundered with an insane voice that racked the ship.
Fireworks exploded in space when the bolt struck Craven's ship. Screen after screen exploded in glittering, flaming sparks, but the ship rode the lashing charge, finally halted the thrust of power. The beam glowed faintly, died out.
Perspiration streamed down Greg's face as he bent over a calculator and constructed the formula for a magnetic field. He sent out a field of such unimaginable intensity that it would have drawn any beryl-steel within a mile of it into a hard, compact mass. Even theInvincible, a hundred miles away, lurched under the strain. But Craven's ship, after the first wild jerk, did not move. A curious soft glow spread out from the ship, veered sharply and disappeared in the magnetic field.
Greg swore softly. "He's cutting it down as fast as I try to build it up," he explained, "and I can't move it any nearer."
From Craven's ship lashed out another thunderbolt and once again the engines screamed in terrible unison as they poured power into the ship's triple screen. The first screen stoppedall material things. The second stopped radiations by refracting them into the fourth dimension. The third shield was akin to the anti-entropy field, which stopped all matter ... and yet the ten engines bellowed like things insane as Craven struck with flaming bolts, utilizing the power he had absorbed from the fifty billion horsepower Greg had thrown at him.
There was anger in Greg Manning's face ... a terrible anger. His fists knotted and he shook them at the gleaming ship that lay far down near Jupiter.
"I've got one trick left," he shouted, almost as if he expected Craven to hear. "Just one trick. Damn you, see if you can stop this one!"
He set up the pattern on the board and punched the activating lever. The ten engines thrummed with power. Then the howling died away.
Four times they screamed and four times they ebbed into a gentle hum.
"Get on the navigation controls!" yelled Greg. "Be ready to give the ship all you've got."
Greg leaped for the control chair, grasped the acceleration lever.
"Now," growled Greg, "look out, Craven, we're coming at you!"
Greg, teeth gritted, slammed the acceleration over.
Suddenly all space wrenched horribly with a nauseating, terrible thud that seemed to strain at the very anchors of the Universe.