fate in the cold eyes that stared into his. Chattering frightenedly, he rushed at Greg, plunged through him, collided with the wall of the ship and toppled over, feebly attempting to rise.
Invisible hands hoisted him to his feet, gripped him, held him upright. Greg walked toward him, stood facing him.
“Stutsman,” he said, “you have four hours of air. That will give you four hours to think, to make your peace with death.” He turned toward the other two. Chambers nodded grimly. Craven said nothing.
“And now,” said Greg to Craven, “if you will fasten down his helmet.”
The helmet clanged shut, shutting out the pleas and threats that came from Stutsman’s throat.
*
Stutsman saw distant stars, cruel, gleaming eyes that glared at him. Empty space fell away on all sides.
Numbed by fear, he realized where he was. Manning had picked him up and thrown him far into space ... out into that waste where for hundreds of light years there was only the awful nothingness of space.
He was less than a speck of dust, in this great immensity of emptiness. There was no up or down, no means of orientation.
Loneliness and terror closed in on him, a terrible agony of fear. In four hours his air would be gone and then he would die! His body would swirl and eddy through this great cosmic ocean. It would never be found. It would remain here, embalmed by the cold of space, until the last clap of eternity.
There was one way, the easy way. His hand reached up and grasped the connection between his helmet and the air tank. One wrench and he would die swiftly, quickly ... instead of letting death stalk him through the darkness for the next four hours.
He shivered and his hand loosened its hold, dropped away. He was afraid to hasten death. He wanted to put it off. He was afraid of death ... horribly afraid.
The stars mocked him and he seemed to hear hooting laughter from somewhere far away. Curiously, it sounded like his own laughter....
*
“I’ll make it easy for you, Manning,” Chambers said. “I know that all of us are guilty. Guilty in the eyes of the people and the law. Guilty in your eyes. If we had won, there would have been no penalty. There’s never a penalty for the one who wins.”
“Penalty,” said Greg, his eyes half smiling. “Why, yes, I think there is. I’m going to order you aboard the Invincible for something to eat and to get some rest.”
“You mean to say that we aren’t prisoners?”
Greg shook his head. “Not prisoners,” he said. “Why, I came out here to guide you back to Earth. I hauled you out here and got you into this jam. It was up to me to get you out of it. I would have done the same for Stutsman, too, but ...”
He hesitated and looked at Chambers.
Chambers stared back and slowly nodded.
“Yes, Manning,” he said. “I think I understand.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Chambers lit his cigar and leaned back in his chair.
“I wish you could see it my way, Manning,” he said. “There’s no place for me on Earth, no place for me in the Solar System. You see, I tried and failed. I’m just a has-been back there.”
He laughed quietly. “Somehow, I can’t imagine myself coming back in the role of the defeated tribal leader, chained to your chariot, so to speak.”
“But it wouldn’t be that way,” protested Greg. “Your company is gone, true, and your stocks are worthless, but you haven’t lost everything. You still have a fleet of ships. With our new power, the Solar System will especially need ships. Lots of ships. For the spacelanes will be filled with commerce. You’d be coming back to a new deal, a new Solar System, a place that has been transformed almost overnight by power that’s practically free.”
“Yes, yes, I know all that,” said Chambers. “But I climbed too high. I got too big. I can’t come back now as something small, a failure.”
“You have things we need,” said Greg. “The screen that blankets out our television and tele-transport, for example. We need your screen as a safeguard against the very thing we have created. Think of what criminal uses could be made of the tele-transport. No vault, no net of charged wires, nothing, could stop a thief from taking anything he wanted. Prisons would cease to be prisons. Criminals could reach in and pick up their friends, no matter how many guards there were. Prisons and bank vaults and national treasuries could be cleaned out in a single day.”
“Then there’s the super-saturated space fields,” added Russ, ruefully. “Those almost got us. If I hadn’t thought of moving the televisor through time, we would have had to pull stakes and run for it.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” pointed out Craven. “You could have wiped us out in a moment. You can disintegrate matter. Send it up in a puff of smoke ... rip every electron apart and send it hurtling away.”
“Of course we could have, Craven,” said Greg, “but we wouldn’t.”
Chambers laughed softly. “Not quite mad enough at us to do that, eh?”
Greg looked at him. “I guess that must have been it.”
“But I’m curious about the green space fields,” persisted Russ.
“Simple,” said Craven. “They were just fields that had more energy packed into a certain portion of space than space could take. Space fields that had far more than their share of energy, more than they could hold. A super-saturated solution will crystalize almost immediately onto the tiniest crystal put into it. Those fields acted the same way. They crystalized instantly into hyper-space the moment they came into contact with other energy, whether as photons of radiation, matter or other space fields. Your anti-entropy didn’t stand a chance under those conditions. When they crystalized, they took a chunk of the field along with them, a small chunk, but one after another they ate a hole right through your screen.”
*
“Something like that would have a commercial value,” said Greg. “Useful in war, too, and now that mankind has taken to space, now that we’re spreading out, we must think of possible attack. There must be life on other planets throughout the Galaxy. Someday they’ll come. If they don’t, someday we’ll go to them. And we may need every type of armament we can get our hands on.”
Chambers knocked the ash off his cigar and was staring out the vision port. The ship had swung so that through the port could be seen the distant star toward which the Interplanetarian had been driving.
“For my part,” said Chambers, slowly, measuring each word, “you can have those findings of ours. We’ll give them to you, knowing you will use them as they should be used. Craven can tell you how they work. That is, if Craven wants to. He is the man who developed them.”
“Certainly,” said Craven. “They’ll be something to remember us by.”
*
“But
