Empire | Page 9

might be insulated, the atmosphere itself
would not be an insulator, with power such as this. And if one tried to
deliver the energy as a mechanical rotation of a shaft, what shaft could
transmit it safely and under control?
"Oh, hell," Russ burst out, "let's get back to Earth."
* * *
Harry Wilson watched the couple alight from the aero-taxi, walk up the
broad steps and pass through the magic portals of the Martian Club. He
could imagine what the club was like, the deference of the management,
the exotic atmosphere of the dining room, the excellence of the long,
cold drinks served at the bar. Mysterious drinks concocted of
ingredients harvested in the jungles of Venus, spiced with produce
from the irrigated gardens of Mars.
He puffed on the dangling cigarette and shuffled on along the airy
highwalk. Below and above him, all around him flowed the beauty and
the glamor, the bravery and the splendor of New York. The city's song

was in his ears, the surging noises that were its voice.
Two thousand feet above his head reared giant pinnacles of shining
metal, glinting in the noonday Sun, architecture that bore the alien
stamp of other worlds.
Wilson turned around, stared at the Martian Club. A man needed
money to pass through those doors, to taste the drinks that slid across
its bar, to sit and watch its floor shows, to hear the music of its
orchestras.
For a moment he stood, hesitating, as if he were trying to make up his
mind. He flipped away the cigarette, turned on his heel, walked briskly
to the automatic elevator which would take him to the lower levels.
There, on the third level, he entered a Mecho restaurant, sat down at a
table and ordered from the robot waiter, pushing ivory-tipped buttons
on the menu before him.
He ate leisurely, smoked ferociously, thinking. Looking at his watch,
he saw that it was nearly two o'clock. He walked to the cashier machine,
inserted the metallic check with the correct change and received from
the clicking, chuckling register the disk that would let him out the door.
"Thank you, come again," the cashier-robot fluted.
"Don't mention it," growled Wilson.
Outside the restaurant he walked briskly. Ten blocks away he came to a
building roofing four square blocks. Over the massive doorway, set into
the beryllium steel, was a map of the Solar System, a map that served
as a cosmic clock, tracing the movement of the planets as they swung
in their long arcs around the Sun. The Solar System was straddled by
glowing, golden letters. They read: interplanetary building.
It was from here that Spencer Chambers ruled his empire built on
power.

Wilson went inside.
CHAPTER FOUR
The new apparatus was set up, a machine that almost filled the
laboratory... a giant, compact mass of heavy, solidly built metal work,
tied together by beams of girderlike construction. It was meant to stand
up under the hammering of unimaginable power, the stress of unknown
spatial factors.
Slowly, carefully, Russell Page tapped keys on the control board,
setting up an equation. Sucking thoughtfully at his pipe, he checked
and rechecked them.
Harry Wilson regarded him through squinted eyes.
"What the hell is going to happen now?" he asked.
"We'll have to wait and see," Russ answered. "We know what we want
to happen, what we hope will happen, but we never can be sure. We are
working with conditions that are entirely new."
Sitting beside a table littered with papers, staring at the gigantic
machine before him, Gregory Manning said slowly: "That thing simply
has to adapt itself to spaceship drive. There's everything there that's
needed for space propulsion. Unlimited power from a minimum of fuel.
Splitsecond efficiency. Entire independence of any set condition,
because the stuff creates its own conditions."
He slowly wagged his head.
"The secret is some place along the line," he declared. "I feel that we
must be getting close to it."
Russ walked from the control board to the table, picked up a sheaf of
papers and leafed through them. He selected a handful and shook them
in his fist.

"I thought I had it here," he said. "My math must have been wrong,
some factor that I didn't include in the equation."
"You'll keep finding factors for some time yet," Greg prophesied.
"Repulsion would have been the answer," said Russ bitterly. "And the
Lord knows we have it. Plenty of it."
"Too much," observed Wilson, smoke drooling from his nostrils.
"Not too much," corrected Greg. "Inefficient control. You jump at
conclusions, Wilson."
"The math didn't show that progressive action," said Russ. "It showed
repulsion, negative gravity that could be built up until it would shoot
the ship outside the Solar System within an hour's time. Faster than