Empire - (3)

*       *       *       *       *
    "Damn," said Russ, "that thing's slipped again."
    He glared at the offending nut. "I'll put a lock washer on it this time."
    Wilson stepped toward the control board. From his perch on the apparatus, Russ motioned him away.
    "Never mind discharging the field," he said. "I can get around it somehow."
    Wilson squinted at him. "This tooth is near killing me."
    "Still got a toothache?" asked Russ.
    "Never got a wink of sleep last night."
    "You better run down to Frisco and have it yanked out," suggested the scientist. "Can't have you laid up."
    "Yeah, that's right," agreed Wilson. "Maybe I will. We got a lot to do."
    Russ reached out and clamped his wrench on the nut, quickly backed it off and slipped on the washer. Viciously he tightened it home. The wrench stuck.
    Gritting his teeth on the bit of his pipe, Russ cursed soundlessly. He yanked savagely at the wrench. It slipped from his hand, hung for a minute on the nut and then plunged downward, falling straight into the heart of the new force field they had developed.
    Russ froze and watched, his heart in his throat, mad thoughts in his brain. In a flash, as the wrench fell, he remembered that they knew nothing about this field. All they knew was that any matter introduced in it suddenly acquired an acceleration in the dimension known as time, with its normal constant of duration reduced to zero.
    When that wrench struck the field, it would cease to exist! But something else might happen, too, something entirely unguessable.
    The wrench fell only a few feet, but it seemed to take long seconds as Russ watched, frozen in fascination.
    He saw it strike the hazy glow that defined the limits of the field, saw it floating down, as if its speed had been slowed by some dense medium.
    In the instant that hazy glow intensified a thousand times--became a blinding sun-burst! Russ ducked his head, shielded his eyes from the terrible blast of light. A rending, shuddering thud seemed to echo ... in space rather than in air ... and both field and wrench were gone!
    A moment passed, then another, and there was the heavy, solid clanging thud of something striking metal. This time the thud was not in space, but a commonplace noise, as if someone had dropped a tool on the floor above.
    Russ turned around and stared at Wilson. Wilson stared back, his mouth hanging open, the smoldering, cigarette dangling from his mouth.
    "Greg!" Russ shouted, his cry shattering the silence in the laboratory.
    A door burst open and Manning stepped into the main laboratory room, a calculation pad in one hand, a pencil in the other.
    "What's the matter?" he demanded.
    "We have to find my wrench!"
    "Your wrench?" Greg was puzzled. "Can't you get another?"
    "I dropped it into the field. Its time-dimension was reduced to zero. It became an 'instantaneous wrench'."
    "Nothing new in that," said Greg, unruffled.
    "But there is," persisted Russ. "The field collapsed, you see. Maybe the wrench was too big for it to handle. And when the field collapsed the wrench gained a new time-dimension. I heard it. We have to find it."
    The three of them pounded up the stairs to the room where Russ had heard the thump. There was nothing on the floor. They searched the room from end to end, then the other rooms. There was no wrench.
    At the end of an hour Greg went back to the main laboratory, brought back a portable fluoroscope.
    "Maybe this will do the trick," he announced bleakly.
    *       *       *       *       *
    It did. They found the wrench inside the space between the walls!
    Russ stared at the shadow in the fluoroscope plate. Undeniably it was the shadow of the wrench.
    "Fourth dimension," he said. "Transported in time."
    The muscles in Greg's cheeks were tensed, that old flame of excitement burning in his eyes, but otherwise his face was the mask of old, the calm, almost terrible mask that had faced a thousand dangers.
    "Power and time," he corrected.
    "If we can control it," said Russ.
    "Don't worry. We can control it. And when we can, it's the biggest thing we've got."
    Wilson licked his lips, dredged a cigarette out of a pocket.
    "If you don't mind," he said, "I'll hit for Frisco tonight. This tooth of mine is getting worse."
    "Sure, can't keep an aching tooth," agreed Russ, thinking of the wrench while talking.
    "Can I take your ship?" asked Wilson.
    "Sure," said Russ.
    Back in the laboratory they rebuilt the field, dropped little ball bearings in it. The ball bearings disappeared. They found them everywhere--in the walls, in tables, in the floor. Some, still existing in their new time-dimension, hung in mid-air, invisible, intangible, but there.
    Hours followed hours, with the sheet of data growing. Math machines whirred and chuckled and clicked. Wilson departed for San Francisco with his aching tooth. The other two worked on. By dawn they knew what they were doing. Out of the chaos of happenstance they were finding rules of order, certain formulas of behavior, equations of force.
    The next day they tried heavier, more complicated things and learned still more.
    A radiogram, phoned from the nearest spaceport, forty miles distant, informed them that Wilson would not be back for a few days. His tooth was worse than he had thought, required an operation and treatment of the jaw.
    "Hell," said Russ, "just when he could be so much help."
    With Wilson gone the two of them tackled the controlling device, labored and swore over it. But finally it was completed.
    Slumped in chairs, utterly exhausted, they looked proudly at it.
    "With that," said Russ, "we can take an object and transport it any place we want. Not only that, we can pick up any object from an indefinite distance and bring it to us."
    "What a thing for a lazy burglar," Greg observed sourly.
    Worn out, they gulped sandwiches and scalding coffee, tumbled into bed.
    *       *       *       *       *
    The outdoor camp meeting was in full swing. The evangelist was in his top form. The sinners' bench was crowded. Then suddenly, as the evangelist paused for a moment's silence before he drove home an important point, the music came. Music from the air. Music from somewhere in the sky. The soft, heavenly music of a hymn. As if an angels' chorus were singing in the blue.
    The evangelist froze, one arm pointing upward, with index finger ready to sweep down and emphasize his point. The sinners kneeling at the bench were petrified. The congregation was astounded.
    The hymn rolled on, punctuated, backgrounded by deep celestial organ notes. The clear voice of the choir swept high to a bell-like note.
    "Behold!" shrieked the evangelist. "Behold, a miracle! Angels singing for us! Kneel! Kneel and pray!"
    Nobody stood.
    *       *       *       *       *
    Andy McIntyre was drunk again. In the piteous glare of mid-morning, he staggered homeward from the poker party in the back of Steve Abram's harness shop. The light revealed him to the scorn of the entire village.
    At the corner of Elm and Third he ran into a maple tree. Uncertainly he backed away, intent on making another try. Suddenly the tree spoke to him:
    "Alcohol is the scourge of mankind. It turns men into beasts. It robs them of their brains, it shortens their lives ..."
    Andy stared, unable to believe what he heard. The tree, he had no doubt, was talking to him personally.
    The voice of the tree went on: "... takes the bread out of the mouths of women and children. Fosters crime. Weakens the moral fiber of the nation."
    "Stop!" screamed Andy. "Stop, I tell you!"
    The tree stopped talking. All he could hear was the whisper of wind among its autumn-tinted leaves.
    Suddenly running, Andy darted around the corner, headed home.
    "Begad," he told himself, "when trees start talkin' to you it's time to lay off the bottle!"
    *       *       *       *       *
    In another town fifty miles distant from the one in which the tree had talked to Andy McIntyre, another miracle happened that same Sunday morning.
    Dozens of people heard the bronze statue of the soldier in the courtyard speak. The statue did not come to life. It stood as ever, a solid piece of golden bronze, in spots turned black and green by weather. But from its lips came words ... words that burned themselves into the souls of those who heard. Words that exhorted them to defend the principles for which many men had died, to grasp and hold high the torch of democracy and liberty.
    In somber bitterness, the statue called Spencer Chambers the greatest threat to that liberty and freedom. For, the statue said, Spencer Chambers and Interplanetary Power were waging an economic war, a bloodless one, but just as truly war as if there were cannons firing and bombs exploding.
    For a full five minutes the statue spoke and the crowd, growing by the minute, stood dumbfounded.
    Then silence fell over the courtyard. The statue stood as before, unmoving, its timeless eyes staring out from under the ugly helmet, its hands gripping the bayoneted rifle. A blue and white pigeon fluttered softly down, alighted on the bayonet, looked the crowd over and then flew to the courthouse tower.
    *       *       *       *       *
    Back in the laboratory, Russ looked at Greg.
    "That radio trick gives me an idea," he said. "If we can put a radio in statues and trees without interfering with its operation, why can't we do the same thing with a television set?"
    Greg started. "Think of the possibilities of that!" he burst out.
    Within an hour a complete television sending apparatus was placed within the field and a receptor screen set up in the laboratory.
    The two moved chairs in front of the screen and sat down. Russ reached out and pulled the switch of the field control. The screen came to life, but it was only a gray blur.
    "It's traveling too fast," said Greg. "Slow it down."
    Russ retarded the lever. "When that thing's on full, it's almost instantaneous. It travels in a time dimension and any speed slower than instantaneity is a modification of that force field."
    On the screen swam a panorama of the mountains, mile after mile of snow-capped peaks and valleys ablaze with the flames of autumn foliage. The mountains faded away. There was desert now and then a city. Russ dropped the televisor set lower, down into a street. For half an hour they sat comfortably in their chairs and watched men and women walking, witnessed one dog fight, cruised slowly up and down, looking into windows of homes, window-shopping in the business section.
    "There's just one thing wrong," said Greg. "We can see everything, but we can't hear a sound."
    "We can fix that," Russ told him.
    He lifted the televisor set from the streets, brought it back across the desert and mountains into the laboratory.
    "We have two practical applications now," said Greg. "Space drive and television spying. I don't know which is the best. Do you realize that with this television trick there isn't a thing that can be hidden from us?"
    "I believe we can go to Mars or Mercury or anywhere we want to with this thing. It doesn't seem to have any particular limits. It handles perfectly. You can move it a fraction of an inch as easily as a hundred miles. And it's fast. Almost instantaneous. Not quite, for even with our acceleration within time, there is a slight lag."
    By evening they had an audio apparatus incorporated in the set, had wired the screen for sound.
    "Let's put this to practical use," suggested Greg. "There's a show at the New Mercury Theater in New York I've been wanting to see. Let's knock off work and take in that show."
    "Now," said Russ, "you really have an idea. The ticket scalpers are charging a fortune, and it won't cost us a cent to get in!"
    CHAPTER FIVE
    Pine roots burned brightly in the fireplace, snapping and sizzling as the blaze caught and flamed on the resin. Deep in an easy chair, Greg Manning stretched his long legs out toward the fire and lifted his glass, squinting at the flames through the amber drink.
    "There's something that's been worrying me a little," he said. "I hadn't told you about it because I figured it wasn't as serious as it looked. Maybe it isn't, but it looks funny."
    "What's that?" asked Russ.
    "The stock market," replied Greg. "There's something devilish funny going on there. I've lost about a billion dollars in the last two weeks."
    "A billion dollars?" gasped Russ.
    Greg swirled the whiskey in his glass. "Don't sound so horrified. The loss is all on paper. My stocks have gone down. Most of them cut in half. Some even less than that. Martian Irrigation is down to 75. I paid 185 for it. It's worth 200."
    "You mean something has happened to the market?"
    "Not to the market. If that was it, I wouldn't worry. I've seen the market go up and down. That's nothing to worry about. But the market, except for a slight depression, has behaved normally in these past two weeks. It almost looks as if somebody was out to get me."
    "Who'd want to and why?"
    Greg sighed. "I wish I knew. I haven't really lost a cent, of course. My shares can't stay down for very long. The thing is that right now I can't sell them even for what I paid for them. If I sold now I'd lose that billion. But as long as I don't have to sell, the loss is merely on paper."
    He sipped at the drink and stared into the fire.
    "If you don't have to, what are you worrying about?" asked Russ.
    "Couple of things. I put that stock up as collateral to get the cash to build the spaceship. At present prices, it will take more securities than I thought. If the prices continue to go down, I'll have the bulk of my holdings tied up in the spaceship. I might even be forced to liquidate some of it and that would mean an actual loss."
    He hunched forward in the chair, stared at Russ.
    "Another thing," he said grimly, "is that I hate the idea of somebody singling me out as a target. As if they were going to make a financial example of me."
    "And it sounds as if someone has," agreed Russ.
    Greg leaned back again, drained his glass and set it down.
    "It certainly does," he said.
    Outside, seen through the window beside the fireplace, the harvest moon was a shield of silver hung in the velvet of the sky. A lonesome wind moaned in the pines and under the eaves.
    "I got a report from Belgium the other day," said Greg. "The spaceship is coming along. It'll be the biggest thing afloat in space."
    "The biggest and the toughest," said Russ, and Greg nodded silent agreement.
    The ship itself was being manufactured at the great Space Works in Belgium, but other parts of it, apparatus, engines, gadgets of every description, were being manufactured at other widely scattered points. Anyone wondering what kind of ship the finished product would be would have a hard time gathering the correct information, which, of course, was the idea. The "anyone" they were guarding against was Spencer Chambers.
    *       *       *       *       *
    "We need a better television set," said Russ. "This one we have is all right, but we need the best there is. I wonder if Wilson could get us one in Frisco and bring it back."
    "I don't see why not," said Greg. "Send him a radio."
    Russ stepped to the phone, called the spaceport and filed the message.
    "He always stays at the Greater Martian," he told Greg. "We'll probably catch him there."
    *       *       *       *       *
    Two hours later the phone rang. It was the spaceport.
    "That message you sent to Wilson," said the voice of the operator, "can't be delivered. Wilson isn't at the Greater Martian. The clerk said he checked out for New York last night."
    "Didn't he leave a forwarding address?" asked Russ.
    "Apparently not."
    Russ hung up the receiver, frowning. "Wilson is in New York."
    Greg looked up from a sheet of calculations.
    "New York, eh?" he said and then went back to work, but a moment later he straightened from his work. "What would Wilson be doing in New York?"
    "I wonder ..." Russ stopped and shook his head.
    "Exactly," said Greg. He glanced out of the window, considering, the muscles in his cheeks knotting. "Russ, we both are thinking the same thing."
    "I hate to think it," said Russ evenly. "I hate to think such a thing about a man."
    "One way to find out," declared Greg. He rose from the chair and walked to the television control board, snapped the switch. Russ took a chair beside him. On the screen the mountains danced weirdly as the set rocketed swiftly away and then came the glint of red and yellow desert. Blackness blanked out the screen as the set plunged into the ground, passing through the curvature of the Earth's surface. The blackness passed and fields and farms were beneath them on the screen, a green and brown checkerboard with tiny white lines that were roads.
    New York was in the screen now. Greg's hand moved the control and the city rushed up at them, the spires speeding toward them like plunging spears. Down into the canyons plunged the set, down into the financial district with its beetling buildings that hemmed in the roaring traffic.
    Grimly, surely, Greg drove his strange machine through New York. Through buildings, through shimmering planes, through men. Like an arrow the television set sped to its mark and then Greg's hand snapped back the lever and in the screen was a building that covered four whole blocks. Above the entrance was the famous Solar System map and straddling the map were the gleaming golden letters: INTERPLANETARY BUILDING.
    "Now we'll see," said Greg.
    He heard the whistle of the breath in Russ's nostrils as the television set began to move, saw the tight grip Russ had upon the chair arms.
    The interior of the building showed on the screen as he drove the set through steel and stone, offices and corridors and brief glimpses of steel partitions, until it came to a door marked: SPENCER CHAMBERS, PRESIDENT.
    Greg's hand twisted the control slightly and the set went through the door, into the office of Spencer Chambers.
    Four men were in the room--Chambers himself; Craven, the scientist; Arnold Grant, head of Interplanetary's publicity department, and Harry Wilson!
    Wilson's voice came out of the screen, a frantic, almost terrified voice.
    "I've told you all I know. I'm not a scientist. I'm a mechanic. I've told you what they're doing. I can't tell you how they do it."
    Arnold Grant leaned forward in his chair. His face was twisted in fury.
    "There were plans, weren't there?" he demanded. "There were equations and formulas. Why didn't you bring us some of them?"
    Spencer Chambers raised a hand from the desk, waved it toward Grant. "The man has told us all he knows. Obviously, he can't be any more help to us."
    "You told him to go back and see if he couldn't find something else, didn't you?" asked Grant.
    "Yes, I did," Chambers told him. "But apparently he couldn't find it."
    "I tried," pleaded Wilson. Perspiration stood out on his forehead. The cigarette in his mouth was limp and dead. "One of them was always there. I never could get hold of any papers. I asked questions, but they were too busy to answer. And I couldn't ask too much, because then they would have suspected me."
    "No, you couldn't do that," commented Craven with an open sneer.
    *       *       *       *       *
    In the laboratory Russ pounded the arm of his chair with a clenched fist. "The rat sold us out!"
    Greg said nothing, but his face was stony and his eyes were crystal-hard.
    On the screen Chambers was speaking to Wilson. "Do you think you could find something out if you went back again?"
    Wilson squirmed in his chair.
    "I'd rather not." His voice sounded like a whimper. "I'm afraid they suspect me now. I'm afraid of what they'd do if they found out."
    "That's his conscience," breathed Russ in the laboratory. "I never suspected him."
    "He's right about one thing, though," Greg said. "He'd better not come back."
    Chambers was talking again: "You realize, of course, that you haven't been much help to us. You have only warned us that another kind of power generation is being developed. You've set us on our guard, but other than that we're no better off than we were before."
    Wilson bristled, like a cowardly animal backed into a corner. "I told you what was going on. You can be ready for it now. I can't help it if I couldn't find out how all them things worked."
    "Look here," said Chambers. "I made a bargain with you and I keep my bargains. I told you I would pay you twenty thousand dollars for the information you gave me when you first came to see me. I told you I'd pay you for any further additional information you might give. Also I promised you a job with the company."
    Watching the financier, Wilson licked his lips. "That's right," he said.
    Chambers reached out and pulled a checkbook toward him, lifted a pen from its holder. "I'm paying you the twenty thousand for the warning. I'm not paying you a dime more, because you gave me no other information."
    Wilson leaped to his feet, started to protest.
    "Sit down," said Chambers coldly.
    "But the job! You said you'd give me a job!"
    Chambers shook his head. "I wouldn't have a man like you in my organization. If you were a traitor to one man, you would be to another."
    "But ... but ..." Wilson started to object and then sat down, his face twisted in something that came very close to fear.
    Chambers ripped the check out of the book, waved it slowly in the air to dry it. Then he arose and held it out to Wilson, who reached out a trembling hand and took it.
    "And now," said Chambers, "good day, Mr. Wilson."
    For a moment Wilson stood uncertain, as if he intended to speak, but finally he turned, without a word, and walked through the door.
    *       *       *       *       *
    In the laboratory Russ and Greg looked at one another.
    "Twenty thousand," said Greg. "Why, that was worth millions."
    "It was worth everything Chambers had," said Russ, "because it's the thing that's going to wreck him."
    Their attention snapped back to the screen.
    Chambers was hunched over his desk, addressing the other two.
    "Now, gentlemen," he asked, "what are we to do?"
    Craven shrugged his shoulders. There was a puzzled frown in the eyes back of the thick-lensed glasses. "We haven't much to go on. Wilson doesn't know a thing about it. He hasn't the brain to grasp even the most fundamental ideas back of the whole thing."
    Chambers nodded. "The man knew the mechanical setup perfectly, but that was all."
    "I've constructed the apparatus," said Craven. "It's astoundingly simple. Almost too simple to do the things Wilson said it would do. He drew plans for it, so clear that it was easy to duplicate the apparatus. He himself checked the machine and says it is the same as Page and Manning have. But there are thousands of possible combinations for hookups and control board settings. Too many to try to go through and hit upon the right answer. Because, you see, one slight adjustment in any one of a hundred adjustments might do the trick ... but which of those adjustments do you have to make? We have to have the formulas, the equations, before we can even move."
    "He seemed to remember a few things," said Grant hopefully. "Certain rules and formulas."
    Craven flipped both his hands angrily. "Worse than nothing," he exploded. "What Page and Manning have done is so far in advance of anything that anyone else has even thought about that we are completely at sea. They're working with space fields, apparently, and we haven't even scratched the surface in that branch of investigation. We simply haven't got a thing to go on."
    *       *       *       *       *
    "No chance at all?" asked Chambers.
    Craven shook his head slowly.
    "At least you could try," snapped Grant.
    "Now, wait," Chambers snapped back. "You seem to forget Dr. Craven is one of the best scientists in the world today. I'm relying on him."
    Craven smiled. "I can't do anything with what Page and Manning have, but I might try something of my own."
    "By all means do so," urged Chambers. He turned to Grant. "I observed you have carried out the plans we laid. Martian Irrigation hit a new low today."
    Grant grinned. "It was easy. Just a hint here and there to the right people."