EMPIRE (2 page)

The flame was a transparent cloud. The blue and red of flame and hot wire had changed, in the whiplash of a second, to a refractive but transparent cloud that hung there within the apparatus.

* * * *

The
red color had vanished from the wire as the blue had vanished from the flame. The wire was shining. It wasn’t silvery; it wasn’t white. There was no hint of color, just a refractive blur that told him the wire was there. Colorless reflection.
And that meant perfect reflection!
The most perfect reflectors reflect little more than 98 per cent of the light incident and the absorption of the two per cent colors those reflectors as copper or gold or chromium. But the imperm wire within that force field that had been flame a moment before, was reflecting
all
light.

He had cut the wire with a pair of shears and it had still hung, unsupported, in the air, unchanging within the shimmer that constituted something no man had ever seen before.

“You can’t put energy in,” said Page, talking to himself, chewing the bit of his pipe. “You can’t take energy out. It’s still as hot as it was at the moment the change came. But it can’t radiate any of that heat. It can’t radiate any kind of energy.”

Why, even the wire was reflective, so that it couldn’t absorb energy and thus disturb the balance that existed within that bit of space. Not only energy itself was preserved, but the very form of energy.

But why? That was the question that hammered at him. Why? Before he could go ahead, he had to know why.

Perhaps the verging of the field toward Field 349? Somewhere in between those two fields of force, somewhere within that almost non-existent borderline which separated them, he might find the secret.

Rising to his feet, he knocked out his pipe.

“Harry,” he announced, “we have work to do.”

Smoke drooled from Wilson’s nostrils.

“Yeah,” he said.

Page had a sudden urge to lash out and hit the man. That eternal drooling of smoke out of his nostrils, that everlasting cigarette dangling limply from one corner of his mouth, the shifty eyes, the dirty fingernails, got on his nerves.

But Wilson was a mechanical genius. His hands were clever despite the dirty nails. They could fashion pinhead cameras and three-gram electroscopes or balances capable of measuring the pressure of electronic impacts. As a laboratory assistant he was unbeatable. If only he wouldn’t answer every statement or question with that nerve-racking ‘yeah’!

Page stopped in front of a smaller room, enclosed by heavy quartz. Inside that room was the great bank of mercury-vapor rectifiers. From them lashed a blue-green glare that splashed against his face and shoulders, painting him in angry, garish color. The glass guarded him from the terrific blast of ultra-violet light that flared from the pool of shimmering molten metal, a terrible emanation that would have flayed a man’s skin from his body within the space of seconds.

* * * *

The
scientist squinted his eyes against the glare. There was something in it that caught him with a deadly fascination. The personification of power — the incredibly intense spot of incandescent vapor, the tiny sphere of blue-green fire, the spinning surge of that shining pool, the intense glare of ionization.

Power . . . the breath of modern mankind, the pulse of progress.

In an adjacent room were the accumulators. Not Interplanetary accumulators, which he would have had to rent, but ones he had bought from a small manufacturer who turned out only ten or fifteen thousand a year . . . not enough to bother Interplanetary.

Gregory Manning had made it possible for him to buy those accumulators. Manning had made many things possible in this little laboratory hidden deep within the heart of the Sierras, many miles from any other habitation.

Manning’s grandfather, Jackson Manning, had first generated the curvature field and overcome gravity, had left his grandson a fortune that approached the five-billion mark. But that had not been all. From his famous ancestor, Manning had inherited a keen, sharp, scientific mind. From his mother’s father, Anthony Barret, he had gained an astute business sense. But unlike his maternal grandfather, he had not turned his attention entirely to business. Old Man Barret had virtually ruled Wall Street for almost a generation, had become a financial myth linked with keen business sense, with an uncanny ability to handle men and money. But his grandson, Gregory Manning, had become known to the world in a different way. For while he had inherited scientific ability from one side of the family, financial sense from the other, he likewise had inherited from some other ancestor — perhaps remote and unknown — a wanderlust that had taken him to the farthest outposts of the Solar System.

* * * *

It
was Gregory Manning who had financed and headed the rescue expedition which took the first Pluto flight off that dark icebox of a world when the exploration ship had crashed. It was he who had piloted home the winning ship in the Jupiter derby, sending his bulleting craft screaming around the mighty planet in a time which set a Solar record. It was Gregory Manning who had entered the Venusian swamps and brought back, alive, the mystery lizard that had been reported there. And he was the one who had flown the serum to Mercury when the lives of ten thousand men depended upon the thrumming engines that drove the shining ship inward toward the Sun.

Russell Page had known him since college days. They had worked out their experiments together in the school laboratories, had spent long hours arguing and wondering . . . debating scientific theories. Both had loved the same girl, both had lost her, and together they had been bitter over it . . . drowning their bitterness in a three-day drunk that made campus history.

After graduation Gregory Manning had gone on to world fame, had roamed over the face of every planet except Jupiter and Saturn, had visited every inhabited moon, had climbed Lunar mountains, penetrated Venusian swamps, crossed Martian deserts, driven by a need to see and experience that would not let him rest. Russell Page had sunk into obscurity, had buried himself in scientific research, coming more and more to aim his effort at the discovery of a new source of power . . . power that would be cheap, that would destroy the threat of Interplanetary dictatorship.

Page turned away from the rectifier room.

“Maybe I’ll have something to show Greg soon,” he told himself. “Maybe, after all these years. . . .”

* * * *

Forty
minutes after Page put through the call to Chicago, Gregory Manning arrived. The scientist, watching for him from the tiny lawn that surrounded the combined home and laboratory, saw his plane bullet into sight, scream down toward the little field and make a perfect landing.

Hurrying toward the plane as Gregory stepped out of it, Russell noted that his friend looked the same as ever, though it had been a year or more since he had seen him. The thing that was discomfiting about Greg was his apparently enduring youthfulness.

He was clad in jodhpurs and boots and an old tweed coat, with a brilliant blue stock at his throat. He waved a hand in greeting and hurried forward. Russ heard the grating of his boots across the gravel of the walk.

Greg’s face was bleak; it always was. A clean, smooth face, hard, with something stern about the eyes.

His grip almost crushed Russ’s hand, but his tone was crisp. “You sounded excited, Russ.”

“I have a right to be,” said the scientist. “I think I have found something at last.”

“Atomic power?” asked Manning. There was no flutter of excitement in his voice, just a little hardening of the lines about his eyes, a little tensing of the muscles in his cheeks.

Russ shook his head. “Not atomic energy. If it’s anything, it’s material energy, the secret of the energy of matter.”

They halted before two lawn chairs.

“Let’s sit down here,” invited Russ. “I can tell it to you out here, show it to you afterward. It isn’t often I can be outdoors.”

“It is a fine place,” said Greg. “I can smell the pines.”

The laboratory perched on a ledge of rugged rock, nearly 7,000 feet above sea level. Before them the land swept down in jagged ruggedness to a valley far below, where a stream flashed in the noonday sun. Beyond climbed pine-clad slopes and far in the distance gleamed shimmering spires of snow-capped peaks.

From his leather jacket Russ hauled forth his pipe and tobacco, lighted up.

“It was this way,” he said. Leaning back comfortably he outlined the first experiment. Manning listened intently.

“Now comes the funny part,” Russ added. “I had hopes before, but I believe this is what put me on the right track. I took a metal rod, a welding rod, you know. I pushed it into that solidified force field, if that is what you’d call it . . . although that doesn’t describe it. The rod went in. Took a lot of pushing, but it went in. And though the field seemed entirely transparent, you couldn’t see the rod, even after I had pushed enough of it in so it should have come out the other side. It was as if it hadn’t entered the sphere of force at all. As if I were just telescoping the rod and its density were increasing as I pushed, like pushing it back into itself, but that, of course, wouldn’t have been possible.”

He paused and puffed at his pipe, his eyes fixed on the snowy peaks far in the purple distance. Manning waited.

“Finally the rod came out,” Russ went on. “Mind you, it came out, even after I would have sworn, if I had relied alone upon my eyes, that it hadn’t entered the sphere at all.
But it came out ninety degrees removed from its point of entry!
”

“Wait a second,” said Manning. “This doesn’t check. Did you do it more than once?”

“I did it a dozen times and the results were the same each time. But you haven’t heard the half of it. When I pulled that rod out — yes, I could pull it out — it was a good two inches shorter than when I had pushed it in. I couldn’t believe that part of it. It was even harder to believe than that the rod should come out ninety degrees from its point of entry. I measured the rods after that and made sure. Kept an accurate record. Every single one of them lost approximately two inches by being shoved into the sphere. Every single one of them repeated the phenomenon of curving within the sphere to come out somewhere else than where I had inserted them.”

* * * *

“Any
explanation of it?” asked Manning, and now there was a cold chill of excitement in his voice.

“Theories, no real explanations. Remember that you can’t see the rod after you push it into the sphere. It’s just as if it isn’t there. Well, maybe it isn’t. You can’t disturb anything within that sphere or you’d change the sum of potential-kinetic-pressure energies within it. The sphere seems dedicated to that one thing . . . it cannot change. If the rod struck the imperm wire within the field, it would press the wire down, would use up energy, decrease the potential energy. So the rod simply had to miss it somehow. I believe it
moved into some higher plane of existence and went around
. And in doing that it had to turn so many corners, so many fourth-dimensional corners, that the length was used up. Or maybe it was increased in density. I’m not sure. Perhaps no one will ever know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?” demanded Manning. “I should have been out here helping you. Maybe I wouldn’t be much good, but I might have helped.”

“You’ll have your chance,” Russ told him. “We’re just starting. I wanted to be sure I had something before I troubled you. I tried other things with that first sphere. I found that metal pushed through the sphere will conduct an electrical current, which is pretty definite proof that the metal isn’t within the sphere at all. Glass can be forced through it without breaking. Not flexible glass, but rods of plain old brittle glass. It turns without breaking, and it also loses some of its length. Water can be forced through a tube inserted in the sphere, but only when terrific pressure is applied. What that proves I can’t even begin to guess.”

“You said you experimented on the first sphere,” said Manning. “Have you made others?”

Russ rose from his chair.

“Come on in, Greg,” he said, and there was a grin on his face. “I have something you’ll have to see to appreciate.”

* * * *

The
apparatus was heavier and larger than the first in which Russ had created the sphere of energy. Fed by a powerful accumulator battery, five power leads were aimed at it, centered in the space between four great copper blocks.

Russ’s hand went out to the switch that controlled the power. Suddenly the power beams flamed, changed from a dull glow into an intense, almost intolerable brilliance. A dull grumble of power climbed up to a steady wail.

The beams had changed color, were bluish now, the typical color of ionized air. They were just power beams, meeting at a common center, but somehow they were queer, too, for though they were capable of slashing far out into space, they were stopped dead. Their might was pouring into a common center and going no farther. A splash of intensely glowing light rested over them, then began to rotate slowly as a motor somewhere hummed softly, cutting through the mad roar and rumble of power that surged through the laboratory.

The glowing light was spinning more swiftly now. A rotating field was being established. The power beams began to wink, falling and rising in intensity. The sphere seemed to grow, almost filling the space between the copper blocks. It touched one and rebounded slightly toward another. It extended, increased slightly. A terrible screaming ripped through the room, drowning out the titanic din as the spinning sphere came in contact with the copper blocks, as force and metal resulted in weird friction.