Upon a satisfactory, efficient power-storage device rested the success or failure of space travel itself. That device and the power it stored were for sale by Interplanetary… and, to all practical purposes, by Interplanetary only.
Accordingly, year after year, Interplanetary had tightened its grip upon the Solar System. Mercury was virtually owned by the company. Mars and Venus were little more than puppet states. And now the government of the Jovian confederacy was in the hands of men who acknowledged Spencer Chambers as their master. On Earth the agents and the lobbyists representing Interplanetary swarmed in every capital, even in the capital of the Central European Federation, whose people were dominated by an absolute dictatorship. For even Central Europe needed accumulators.
"Economic dictatorship,” said Spencer Chambers to himself. “That's what John Moore Mallory called it.” Well, why not? Such a dictatorship would insure the best business brains at the heads of the governments, would give the Solar System a business administration, would guard against the mistakes of popular government.
Democracies were based on a false presumption-the theory that all people were fit to rule. It granted intelligence where there was no intelligence. It presumed ability where there was not the slightest trace of any. It gave the idiot the same political standing as the wise man, the crackpot the same political opportunity as the man of well-grounded common sense, the weakling the same voice as the strong man. It was government by emotion rather than by judgment.
Spencer Chambers’ face took on stern lines. There was no softness left now. The late afternoon sunlight painted angles and threw shadows and created highlights that made him look almost like a granite mask on a solid granite body.
There was no room for Mallory's nonsense in a dynamic, expanding civilization. No reason to kill him-even he might have value under certain circumstances, and no really efficient executive destroys value-but he had to be out of the way where his mob-rousing tongue could do no damage. The damned fool! What good would his idiotic idealism do him on a prison spaceship?
CHAPTER TWO
Russell Page squinted thoughtful eyes at the thing he had created-a transparent cloud, a visible, sharply outlined cloud of something. It was visible as a piece of glass is visible, as a globe of water is visible. There it lay, within his apparatus, a thing that shouldn't be.
"I believe we have something there, Harry,” he said slowly.
Harry Wilson sucked at the cigarette that drooped from the corner of his mouth, blew twin streams of smoke from his nostrils. His eyes twitched nervously.
"Yeah,” he said. “Anti-entropy."
"All of that,” said Russell Page. “Perhaps a whole lot more."
"It stops all energy change,” said Wilson, “as if time stood still and things remained exactly as they were when time had stopped."
"It's more than that,” Page declared. “It conserves not only energy in toto, not only the energy of the whole, but the energy of the part. It is perfectly transparent, yet it has refractive qualities. It won't absorb light because to do so would change its energy content. In that field, whatever is hot stays hot, whatever is cold can't gain heat."
He scraped his hand over a week's growth of beard, considering. From his pocket he took a pipe and a leather pouch. Thoughtfully he filled the pipe and lit it.
It had started with his experiments in Force Field 348, an experiment to observe the effects of heating a conductor in that field. It had been impossible to heat the conductor electrically, for that would have upset the field, changed it, twisted it into something else. So he had used a bunsen burner.
Through half-closed eyes, he still could see that slender strand of imperm wire, how its silvery length had turned to red under the blue flame. Deep red at first and then brighter until it flamed in almost white-hot incandescence. And all the while the humming of the transformer as the force field built up. The humming of the transformer and the muted roaring of the burner and the glowing heat in the length of wire.
Something had happened then… an awesome something. A weird wrench as if some greater power, some greater law had taken hold. A glove of force, invisible, but somehow sensed, had closed about the wire and flame. Instantly the roaring of the burner changed in tone; an odor of gas spewed out of the vents at its base. Something had cut off the flow of flame in the brass tube. Some force, something…
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 border-line 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.