Empire | Page 5

in scientific research, coming more and
more to aim his effort at the discovery of a new source of power...
power that would be cheap, that would destroy the threat of
Interplanetary dictatorship.
Page turned away from the rectifier room.
"Maybe I'll have something to show Greg soon," he told himself.
"Maybe, after all these years...."
* * *
Forty minutes after Page put through the call to Chicago, Gregory
Manning arrived. The scientist, watching for him from the tiny lawn
that surrounded the combined home and laboratory, saw his plane
bullet into sight, scream down toward the little field and make a perfect
landing.
Hurrying toward the plane as Gregory stepped out of it Russell noted
that his friend looked the same as ever, though it had been a year or
more since he had seen him. The thing that was discomfiting about
Greg was his apparently enduring youthfulness.
He was clad in jodhpurs and boots and an old tweed coat, with a
brilliant blue stock at his throat. He waved a hand in greeting and
hurried forward. Russ heard the grating of his boots across the gravel of
the walk.
Greg's face was bleak; it always was. A clean, smooth face, hard, with
something stern about the eyes.
His grip almost crushed Russ's hand, but his tone was crisp. "You
sounded excited, Russ."
"I have a right to be," said the scientist. "I think I have found something

at last."
"Atomic power?" asked Manning. There was no flutter of excitement in
his voice, just a little hardening of the lines about his eyes, a little
tensing of the muscles in his cheeks.
Russ shook his head. "Not atomic energy. If it's anything, it's material
energy, the secret of the energy of matter."
They halted before two lawn chairs.
"Let's sit down here," invited Russ. "I can tell it to you out here, show it
to you afterward. It isn't often I can be outdoors."
"It is a fine place," said Greg. "I can smell the pines."
The laboratory perched on a ledge of rugged rock, nearly 7,000 feet
above sea level. Before them the land swept down in jagged ruggedness
to a valley far below, where a stream flashed in the noonday Sun.
Beyond climbed pine-clad slopes and far in the distance gleamed
shimmering spires of snow-capped peaks.
From his leather jacket Russ hauled forth his pipe and tobacco, lighted
up.
"It was this way," he said. Leaning back comfortably he outlined the
first experiment. Manning listened intently.
"Now comes the funny part," Russ added. "I had hopes before, but I
believe this is what put me on the right track. I took a metal rod, a
welding rod, you know. I pushed it into that solidified force field, if
that is what you'd call it... although that doesn't describe it. The rod
went in. Took a lot of pushing, but it went in. And though the field
seemed entirely transparent, you couldn't see the rod, even after I had
pushed enough of it in so it should have come out the other side. It was
as if it hadn't entered the sphere of force at all. As if I were just
telescoping the rod and its density were increasing as I pushed, like
pushing it back into itself, but that, of course, wouldn't have been

possible."
He paused and puffed at his pipe, his eyes fixed on the snowy peaks far
in the purple distance. Manning waited.
"Finally the rod came out," Russ went on. "Mind you, it came out, even
after I would have sworn, if I had relied alone upon my eyes, that it
hadn't entered the sphere at all. But it came out ninety degrees removed
from its point of entry!"
"Wait a second," said Manning. "This doesn't check. Did you do it
more than once?"
"I did it a dozen times and the results were the same each time. But you
haven't heard the half of it. When I pulled that rod out--yes, I could pull
it out--it was a good two inches shorter than when I had pushed it in. I
couldn't believe that part of it. It was even harder to believe than that
the rod should come out ninety degrees from its point of entry. I
measured the rods after that and made sure. Kept an accurate record.
Every single one of them lost approximately two inches by being
shoved into the sphere. Every single one of them repeated the
phenomenon of curving within the sphere to come out somewhere else
than where I had inserted them."
"ANY explanation of it?" asked Manning, and now there was a cold
chill of excitement in his voice.
"Theories, no real explanations. Remember that you can't see the rod
after you push it into the