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?” he asked.
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.”
*
“Any progress 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 I can 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.”
*
“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.
