use,” said Greg. “Chambers would tie us up in a mile of legal red tape. It would be just like walking up and handing it to him.”
“You guys go ahead and work,” Wilson stated. “I’m taking a vacation. Three months is too damn long to stay out in a spaceship.”
“It doesn’t seem long to me,” said Greg, his tone cold and sharp.
No, thought Russ, it hadn’t seemed long. Perhaps the hours had been rough, the work hard, but he hadn’t noticed. Sleep and food had come in snatches. For three months they had worked in space, not daring to carry out their experiments on Earth ... frankly afraid of the thing they had.
He glanced at Manning.
The three months had left no mark upon him, no hint of fatigue or strain. Russ understood now how Manning had done the things he did. The man was all steel and flame. Nothing could touch him.
“We still have a lot to do,” said Manning.
Russ leaned back and puffed at his pipe.
Yes, there was a lot to do. Transmission problems, for instance. To conduct away such terrific power as they knew they were capable of developing would require copper or silver bars as thick as a man’s thigh, and even so at voltages capable of jumping a two-foot spark gap.
Obviously, a small machine such as they now had would be impractical. No matter how perfectly it might be insulated, the atmosphere itself would not be an insulator, with power such as this. And if one tried to deliver the energy as a mechanical rotation of a shaft, what shaft could transmit it safely and under control?
“Oh, hell,” Russ burst out, “let’s get back to Earth.”
*
Harry Wilson watched the couple alight from the aero-taxi, walk up the broad steps and pass through the magic portals of the Martian Club. He could imagine what the club was like, the deference of the management, the exotic atmosphere of the dining room, the excellence of the long, cold drinks served at the bar. Mysterious drinks concocted of ingredients harvested in the jungles of Venus, spiced with produce from the irrigated gardens of Mars.
He puffed on the dangling cigarette and shuffled on along the airy highwalk. Below and above him, all around him flowed the beauty and the glamor, the bravery and the splendor of New York. The city’s song was in his ears, the surging noises that were its voice.
Two thousand feet above his head reared giant pinnacles of shining metal, glinting in the noonday sun, architecture that bore the alien stamp of other worlds.
Wilson turned around, stared at the Martian Club. A man needed money to pass through those doors, to taste the drinks that slid across its bar, to sit and watch its floor shows, to hear the music of its orchestras.
For a moment he stood, hesitating, as if he were trying to make up his mind. He flipped away the cigarette, turned on his heel, walked briskly to the automatic elevator which would take him to the lower levels.
There, on the third level, he entered a Mecho restaurant, sat down at a table and ordered from the robot waiter, pushing ivory-tipped buttons on the menu before him.
He ate leisurely, smoked ferociously, thinking. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was nearly two o’clock. He walked to the cashier machine, inserted the metallic check with the correct change and received from the clicking, chuckling register the disk that would let him out the door.
“Thank you, come again,” the cashier-robot fluted.
“Don’t mention it,” growled Wilson.
Outside the restaurant he walked briskly. Ten blocks away he came to a building roofing four square blocks. Over the massive doorway, set into the beryllium steel, was a map of the Solar System, a map that served as a cosmic clock, tracing the movement of the planets as they swung in their long arcs around the Sun. The Solar System was straddled by glowing, golden letters. They read: INTERPLANETARY BUILDING.
It was from here that Spencer Chambers ruled his empire built on power.
Wilson went inside.
Chapter Four
The new apparatus was set up, a machine that almost filled the laboratory ... a giant, compact mass of heavy, solidly built metal work, tied together by beams of girderlike construction. It was meant to stand up under the hammering of unimaginable power, the stress of unknown spatial factors.
Slowly, carefully, Russell Page tapped keys on the control board, setting up an equation. Sucking thoughtfully at his pipe, he checked and rechecked them.
Harry Wilson regarded him through squinted eyes.
“What the hell is going to happen now?” he asked.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” Russ answered. “We know what we want to happen, what we hope will happen, but we never can be sure. We are working with conditions that are entirely new.”
Sitting beside a table littered with papers, staring at the gigantic machine before him, Gregory Manning said slowly: “That thing simply has to adapt itself to spaceship drive. There’s everything there that’s needed for space propulsion. Unlimited power from a minimum of fuel. Split-second efficiency. Entire independence of any set condition, because the stuff creates its own conditions.”
He slowly wagged his head.
“The secret is some place along the line,” he declared. “I feel that we must be getting close to it.”
Russ walked from the control board to the table, picked up a sheaf of papers and leafed through them. He selected a handful and shook them in his fist.
“I thought I had it here,” he said. “My math must have been wrong, some factor that I didn’t include in the equation.”
“You’ll keep finding factors for some time yet,” Greg prophesied.
“Repulsion would have been the answer,” said Russ bitterly. “And the Lord knows we have it. Plenty of it.”
“Too much,” observed Wilson, smoke drooling from his nostrils.
“Not too much,” corrected Greg. “Inefficient control. You jump at conclusions, Wilson.”
“The math didn’t show that progressive action,” said Russ. “It showed repulsion, negative gravity that could be built up until it would shoot the ship outside the Solar System within an hour’s time. Faster than light. We don’t know how many times faster.”
“Forget it,” advised Greg. “The way it stands, it’s useless. You get repulsion by progressive steps. A series of squares with one constant factor. It wouldn’t be any good for space travel. Imagine trying to use it on a spaceship. You’d start with a terrific jolt. The acceleration would fade and just when you were recovering from the first jolt, you’d get a second one and that second one would iron you out. A spaceship couldn’t take it, let alone a human body.”
*
“Maybe this will do it,” said Wilson hopefully.
“Maybe,”
