Empire | Page 7

bar into the sphere. There was a groaning crash as the handler
came to a halt, shuddering, with only eight inches of the bar buried in
the sphere. The stench of hot insulation filled the room while the
electric motor throbbed, the rubber treads creaked, the machine groaned
and strained, but the bar would go no farther.
Russ shut off the machine and stood back.
"That gives you an idea," he said grimly.
"The trick now," Greg said, "is to break down the field."
Without a word, Russ reached for the power controls. A sudden roar of
thunderous fury and the beams leaped at the sphere... but this time the
sphere did not materialize again. Again the wrench shuddered through
the laboratory, a wrench that seemed to distort space and time.
Then, as abruptly as it had come, it was gone. But when it ended,
something gigantic and incomprehensibly powerful seemed to rush
soundlessly by... something that was felt and sensed. It was like a great
noiseless, breathless wind in the dead of night that rushed by them and
through them, all about them in space and died slowly away.
But the vanished steel did not reappear with the disappearance of the
sphere and the draining away of power. Almost grotesquely now, the
handler stood poised above the place where the sphere had been and in
its jaws it held the bar. But the end of the bar, the eight inches that had
been within the sphere, was gone. It had been sliced off so sharply that
it left a highly reflective concave mirror on the severed surface.
"Where is it?" demanded Manning. "In that higher dimension?"

Russ shook his head. "You noticed that rushing sensation? That may
have been the energy of matter rushing into some other space. It may
be the key to the energy of matter!"
Gregory Manning stared at the bar. "I'm staying with you, Russ. I'm
seeing this thing through."
"I knew you would," said Russ.
Triumph flamed briefly in Manning's eyes. "And when we finish, we'll
have something that will break Interplanetary. We'll smash their
stranglehold on the Solar System." He stopped and looked at Page.
"Lord, Russ," he whispered, "do you realize what we'll have?"
"I think I do, Greg," the scientist answered soberly. "Material energy
engines. Power so cheap that you won't be able to give it away. More
power than anybody could ever need."
CHAPTER THREE
Russ hunched over the keyboard set in the control room of The Comet
and stared down at the keys. The equation was set and ready. All he
had to do was tap that key and they would know, beyond all argument,
whether or not they had dipped into the awful heart of material energy;
whether, finally, they held in their grasp the key to the release of energy
that would give the System power to spare.
His glance lifted from the keyboard, looked out the observation port.
Through the inkiness of space ran a faint blue thread, a tiny line that
stretched from the ship and away until it was lost in the darkness of the
void.
One hundred thousand miles away, that thread touched the surface of a
steel ball bearing... a speck in the immensity of space.
He thought about that little beam of blue. It took power to do that,
power to hold a beam tight and strong and steady through the stress of
one hundred thousand miles. But it had to be that far away... and they

had that power. From the bowels of the ship came the deep purr of it,
the angry, silky song of mighty engines throttled down.
He heard Harry Wilson shuffling impatiently behind him, smelled the
acrid smoke that floated from the tip of Wilson's cigarette.
"Might as well punch that key, Russ," said Manning's cool voice. "We
have to find out sooner or later."
Russ's finger hovered over the key, steadied and held. When he
punched that key, if everything worked right, the energy in the tiny ball
bearing would be released instantaneously. The energy of a piece of
steel, weighing less than an ounce. Over that tight beam of blue would
flash the impulse of destruction....
His fingers plunged down.
Space flamed in front of them. For just an instant the void seemed filled
with an angry, bursting fire that lapped with hungry tongues of cold,
blue light toward the distant planets. A flare so intense that it was
visible on the Jovian worlds, three hundred million miles away. It
lighted the night-side of Earth, blotting out the stars and Moon, sending
astronomers scurrying for their telescopes, rating foot-high streamers in
the night editions.
Slowly Russ turned around and faced his friend.
"We have it, Greg," he said. "We really have it. We've tested the
control