"Mallory and I are leaving,” Greg told the guard. “We don't like it here. Too stuffy."
The guard lifted a whistle and blew a blast. Feet pounded outside. A prisoner yelled from one of the cells. Another catcalled. Instantly the ship was in an uproar. The convicts took up the yammering, shaking the bars on their doors.
"Lets get started,” Greg said to Mallory. “Hold tight."
Blackness engulfed Mallory. He felt a peculiar twisting wrench. And then he was standing in the control room of a ship and Gregory Manning and another man were smiling at him. White light poured down from a cluster of globes. Somewhere in the ship engines purred with the hum of power. The air was fresh and pure, making him realize how foul and stale the air of the prison ship had been.
Greg held out his hand. “Welcome to our ship."
Mallory gripped his hand, blinking in the light. “Where am I?"
"You are on the Invincible, five million miles off Callisto."
"But were you here all the time?” asked Mallory. “Were you in my cell back there or weren't you?"
"I was really in your cell,” Greg assured him. “I could have just thrown my image there, but I went there personally to get you. Russ Page, here, sent me out. When I gave him the signal, he brought both of us back."
"I'm glad you're with us,” Russ said “Perhaps you'd like a cup of coffee, something to eat."
Mallory stammered. “Why, I really would.” He laughed. “Rations weren't too good in the prison ship."
They sat down while Russ rang the gallery for coffee and sandwiches.
Crisply, Greg informed Mallory of the situation.
"We want to start manufacturing these engines as soon as possible,” he explained, “but I haven't even dared to patent them. Chambers would simply buy out the officials if I tried it on Earth, delay the patent for a few days and then send through papers copied from ours. You know what he'd do with it if he got the patent rights. He'd scrap it and the old accumulator business would go on as always. If I tried it on any other world, with any other government, he'd see that laws were passed to block us. He'd probably instruct the courts to rule against the manufacture of the engines on the grounds that they were dangerous."
Mallory's face was grave. “There's only one answer,” he said. “With the situation on the worlds, with this purge you told me about, there's only one thing to do. We have to act at once. Every minute we wait gives Stutsman just that much longer to tighten his hold."
"And that answer?” asked Russ.
"Revolution,” said Mallory. “Simultaneous revolution in the Jovian confederacy, on Mars and Venus. Once free, the planets will stay free with your material energy engines. Spencer Chambers and his idea of Solar System domination will be too late."
Greg's forehead was wrinkled in thought, his facial muscles tensed.
"First thing to do,” he said, “is to contact all the men we can find… men we can rely on to help us carry out our plans. We'll need more televisor machines, more teleport machines, some for use on Mars and Venus, others for the Jovian moons. We will have to bring the men here to learn to operate them. It'll take a few days. We'll get some men to work on new machines right away."
He started to rise from his chair, but at that moment the coffee and sandwiches arrived.
Greg grinned. “We may as well eat first."
Mallory looked grateful and tried to keep from wolfing the food. The others pretended not to notice. GRIM hours followed, an unrelenting search over two planets and four moons for men whom Mallory considered loyal to his cause-men willing to risk their lives to throw off the yoke of Interplanetary.
They were hard to find. Many of them were dead, victims of the purge. The others were in hiding and word of them was difficult to get.
But slowly, one by one, they were ferreted out, the plan explained to them, and then, by means of the tele-transport, they were brought to the Invincible.
Hour after hour men worked, stripped to their waists, in the glaring inferno of terrible force fields, fashioning new television units. As fast as the sets were constructed, they were placed in operation.
The work went faster than could be expected, yet it was maddeningly slow.
For with the passing of each hour, Stutsman clamped tighter his iron grip on the planets. Concentration camps were filled to overflowing. Buildings were bombed and burned. Murders and executions were becoming too common to be news.
Then suddenly there was a new development.
"Greg, Craven has found something!” Russ cried. “I can't get him!"
Supervising the installation of a new televisor set, Greg spun around. “What's that?"
"Craven! I can't reach him. He's blocking me out!"
Greg helped, but the apparatus was unable to enter the Interplanetary building in New York. Certain other portions of the city adjacent to the building also were blanketed out. In all the Solar System, the Interplanetary building was the only place they could not enter, except the Sun itself.
Craven had developed a field from which their field shied off. The televisor seemed to roll off it like a drop of mercury. That definitely ended all spying on Craven and Chambers.
Russ mopped his brow, sucked at his dead pipe.
"Light penetrates it,” he said. “Matter penetrates it, electricity, all ordinary forces. But this field won't. It's… well, whatever Craven has is similarly dissimilar. The same thing of opposite nature. It repels our field, but doesn't affect anything else. That means he has analyzed our fields. We have Wilson to thank for this."
Greg nodded gravely. “There's just one thing to be thankful for,” he declared. “He probably isn't any nearer our energy than he was before. But now we can't watch him. And that field of his shows that he has tremendous power of some sort."
"We can't watch him, but we can follow him,” corrected Russ. “He can't shake us. None of them can. The mechanical shadow will take care of that. I have one for Craven with a bit of ‘bait’ off his spectacles and he'll keep those spectacles, never fear. He's blind as a bat without them. And we can track Chambers with his ring."
"That's right,” agreed Greg, “but we've got to speed up. Craven is getting under way now. If he does this, he can do something else. Something that will really hurt us. The man's clever… too damn clever."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Miracle came to pass in Ranthoor when a man for whom all hope had been abandoned suddenly appeared within the city's streets. But he appeared to be something not quite earthly, for he did not have the solidity of a man. He was pale, like a wraith from out of space, and one could see straight through him, yet he still had all the old mannerisms and tricks.
In frightened, awe-stricken whispers the word was spread… the spirit of John Moore Mallory had come back to the city once again. He bulked four times the height of a normal man and there was that singular ghostliness about him. From where he had come, or how, or why, no one seemed to know.
But when he reached the steps of the federation's administration building and walked straight through a line of troopers that suddenly massed to bar his way, and when he turned on those steps and spoke to the people who had gathered, there was none to doubt that at last a sign had come. The sign that now, if ever, was the time to avenge the purge. Now the time to take vengeance for the blood that flowed in gutters, for the throaty chortling of the flame guns that had snuffed out lives against a broad steel wall.
Standing on the steps, shadowy but plainly visible, John Moore Mallory talked to the people in the square below, and his voice was the voice they remembered. They saw him toss his black mane of hair, they saw his clenched fist raised in terrible anger, they heard the boom of the words he spoke.