might do the trick,” said Greg. “It’s a new approach to the gravity angle. The equation explains the shifting of gravitational lines, the changing and contortion of their direction. Twist gravity and you have a perfect space drive. As good as negative gravity. Better, perhaps, more easily controlled. Would make for more delicate, precise handling.”
Russ laid down the sheaf of papers, lit his pipe and walked to the apparatus.
“Here goes,” he said.
His hand went out to the power lever, eased it in. With a roar the material energy engine built within the apparatus surged into action, sending a flow of power through the massive leads. The thunder mounted in the room. The laboratory seemed to shudder with the impact.
Wilson, watching intently, cried out, a brief, choked-off cry. A wave of dizziness engulfed him. The walls seemed to be falling in. The room and the machine were blurring. Russ, at the controls, seemed horribly disjointed. Manning was a caricature of a man, a weird, strange figure that moved and gestured in the mad room.
Wilson fought against the dizziness. He tried to take a step and the floor seemed to leap up and meet his outstretched foot, throwing him off balance. His cigarette fell out of his mouth, rolled along the floor.
Russ was shouting something, but the words were distorted, loud one instant, rising over the din of the apparatus, a mere whisper the next. They made no sense.
There was a peculiar whistling in the air, a sound such as he had never heard before. It seemed to come from far away, a high, thin shriek that was torture in one’s ears.
Giddy, seized with deathly nausea, Wilson clawed his way across the floor, swung open the laboratory door and stumbled outdoors. He weaved across the lawn and clung to a sun dial, panting.
He looked back at the laboratory and gasped in disbelief. All the trees were bent toward the building, as if held by some mighty wind. Their branches straining, every single leaf standing at rigid attention, the trees were bending in toward the structure. But there was no wind.
And then he noticed something else. No matter where the trees stood, no matter in what direction from the laboratory, they all bent inward toward the building ... and the whining, thundering, shrieking machine.
Inside the laboratory an empty bottle crashed off a table and smashed into a thousand fragments. The tinkling of the broken glass was a silvery, momentary sound that protested against the blasting thrum of power that shook the walls.
Manning fought along the floor to Russ’s side. Russ roared in his ear: “Gravitational control! Concentration of gravitational lines!”
The papers on the desk started to slide, slithering onto the floor, danced a crazy dervish across the room. Liquids in the laboratory bottles were climbing the sides of glass, instead of lying at rest parallel with the floor. A chair skated, bucking and tipping crazily, toward the door.
*
Russ jerked the power lever back to zero. The power hum died. The liquids slid back to their natural level, the chair tipped over and lay still, papers fluttered gently downward.
The two men looked at one another across the few feet of floor space between them. Russ wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead with his shirt sleeve. He sucked on his pipe, but it was dead.
“Greg,” Russ said jubilantly, “we have something better than anti-gravity! We have something you might call positive gravity ... gravity that we can control. Your grandfather nullified gravity. We’ve gone him one better.”
Greg gestured toward the machine. “You created an attraction center. What else?”
“But the center itself is not actually an attracting force. The fourth dimension is mixed up in this. We have a sort of fourth-dimensional lens that concentrates the lines of any gravitational force. Concentration in the fourth dimension turns the force loose in three dimensions, but we can take care of that by using mirrors of our anti-entropy. We can arrange it so that it turns the force loose in only one dimension.”
Greg was thoughtful for a moment. “We can guide a ship by a series of lenses,” he declared at last. “But here’s the really important thing. That field concentrates the forces of gravity already present. Those forces exist throughout all of space. There are gravitational lines everywhere. We can concentrate them in any direction we want to. In reality, we fall toward the body which originally caused the force of gravitation, not to the concentration.”
*
Russ nodded. “That means we can create a field immediately ahead of the ship. The ship would fall into it constantly, with the concentration moving on ahead. The field would tend to break down in proportion to the strain imposed and a big ship, especially when you are building up speed, would tend to enlarge it, open it up. But the field could be kept tight by supplying energy and we have plenty of that ... far more than we’d ever need. We supply the energy, but that’s only a small part of it. The body emitting the gravitational force supplies the fulcrum that moves us along.”
“It would operate beyond the planets,” said Greg. “It would operate equally well anywhere in space, for all of space is filled with gravitational stress. We could use gravitational bodies many light years away as the driver of our ships.”
A half-wild light glowed momentarily in his eyes.
“Russ,” he said, “we’re going to put space fields to work at last.”
He walked to the chair, picked it up and sat down in it.
“We’ll start building a ship,” he stated, “just as soon as we know the mechanics of this gravity concentration and control. Russ, we’ll build the greatest ship, the fastest ship, the most powerful ship the Solar System has ever known!”
*
“Damn,” said Russ, “that thing’s slipped again.”
He glared at the offending nut. “I’ll put a lock washer on it this time.”
Wilson stepped toward the control board. From his perch on the apparatus, Russ motioned him away.
“Never mind discharging the field,” he said. “I can get around it somehow.”
Wilson squinted at him. “This tooth is near killing me.”
“Still got a toothache?” asked Russ.
“Never got a wink of sleep last night.”
“You better run down to Frisco and have it yanked out,” suggested the scientist. “Can’t have you laid up.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” agreed Wilson. “Maybe I will. We got a lot to do.”
Russ reached out and clamped his wrench on the nut, quickly backed it off and slipped on the washer. Viciously he tightened it home. The wrench stuck.
Gritting his teeth on the bit of his pipe, Russ cursed soundlessly. He yanked savagely at the wrench. It slipped from his hand, hung for a minute on the nut and then plunged downward, falling straight into the heart of the new force field they had developed.
Russ froze and watched, his heart in his throat, mad thoughts in his brain. In a
