Empire | Page 2

countered Craven. "You're watching
everybody all the time."
"You sold me a gadget I didn't need five years ago," said Chambers.
"You outfoxed me and I don't hold it against you. In fact, it almost
made me admire you. Because of that I put you under a contract, one
that you and all the lawyers in hell can't break, because someday you'll
find something valuable, and when you do, I want it. A million a year
is a high price to pay to protect myself against you, but I think it's
worth it. If I didn't think so, I'd have turned you over to Stutsman long
ago. Stutsman knows how to handle men like you."
"You mean," said Craven, "that you've found I'm working on
something I haven't reported to you."
"That's exactly it."
"You'll get a report when I have something to report. Not before."
"That's all right," said Chambers. "I just wanted you to know."
Craven got to his feet slowly. "These talks with you are so refreshing,"

he remarked.
"We'll have to have them oftener," said Chambers.
Craven banged the door as he went out.
Chambers stared after him. A queer man, the most astute scientific
mind anywhere, but not a man to be trusted.
* * *
The president of Interplanetary Power rose from his chair and walked
to the window. Below spread the roaring inferno of New York, greatest
city in the Solar System, a strange place of queer beauty and weighty
materialism, dreamlike in its super-skyscraper construction, but
utilitarian in its purpose, for it was a port of many planets.
The afternoon sunlight slanted through the window, softening the
iron-gray hair of the man who stood there. His shoulders almost
blocked the window, for he had the body of a fighting man, one,
moreover, in good condition. His short-clipped mustache rode with an
air of dignity above his thin, rugged mouth.
His eyes looked out on the city, but did not see it. Through his brain
went the vision of a dream that was coming true. His dream spun its
fragile net about the planets of the Solar System, about their moons,
about every single foot of planetary ground where men had gone to
build and create a second homeland--the mines of Mercury and the
farms of Venus, the pleasure-lands of Mars and the mighty domed
cities on the moons of Jupiter, the moons of Saturn and the great, cold
laboratories of Pluto.
Power was the key, supplied by the accumulators owned and rented by
Interplanetary Power. A monopoly of power. Power that Venus and
Mercury had too much of, must sell on the market, and that the other
planets and satellites needed. Power to drive huge spaceships across the
void, to turn the wheels of industry, to heat the domes on colder worlds.
Power to make possible the life and functioning of mankind on hostile

worlds.
In the great power plants of Mercury and Venus, the accumulators were
charged and then shipped out to those other worlds where power was
needed. Accumulators were rented, never sold. Because they belonged
at all times to Interplanetary Power, they literally held the fate of all the
planets in their cells.
A few accumulators were manufactured and sold by other smaller
companies, but they were few and the price was high. Interplanetary
saw to that. When the cry of monopoly was raised, Interplanetary could
point to these other manufacturers as proof that there was no restraint
of trade. Under the statute no monopoly could be charged, but the cost
of manufacturing accumulators alone was protection against serious
competition from anyone.
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