"Why didn't you tell me about this sooner?” demanded Manning. “I should have been out here helping you. Maybe I wouldn't be much good, but I might have helped."
"You'll have your chance,” Russ told him. “We're just starting. I wanted to be sure I had something before I troubled you. I tried other things with that first sphere. I found that metal pushed through the sphere will conduct an electrical current, which is pretty definite proof that the metal isn't within the sphere at all. Glass can be forced through it without breaking. Not flexible glass, but rods of plain old brittle glass. It turns without breaking, and it also loses some of its length. Water can be forced through a tube inserted in the sphere, but only when terrific pressure is applied. What that proves I can't even begin to guess."
"You said you experimented on the first sphere,” said Manning. “Have you made others?"
Russ rose from his chair.
"Come on in, Greg,” he said, and there was a grin on his face. “I have something you'll have to see to appreciate."
The apparatus was heavier and larger than the first in which Russ had created the sphere of energy. Fed by a powerful accumulator battery, five power leads were aimed at it, centered in the space between four great copper blocks.
Russ's hand went out to the switch that controlled the power. Suddenly the power beams flamed, changed from a dull glow into an intense, almost intolerable brilliance. A dull grumble of power climbed up to a steady wail.
The beams had changed color, were bluish now, the typical color of ionized air. They were just power beams, meeting at a common center, but somehow they were queer, too, for though they were capable of slashing far out into space, they were stopped dead. Their might was pouring into a common center and going no farther. A splash of intensely glowing light rested over them, then began to rotate slowly as a motor somewhere hummed softly, cutting through the mad roar and rumble of power that surged through the laboratory.
The glowing light was spinning more swiftly now. A rotating field was being established. The power beams began to wink, falling and rising in intensity. The sphere seemed to grow, almost filling the space between the copper blocks. It touched one and rebounded slightly toward another. It extended, increased slightly. A terrible screaming ripped through the room, drowning out the titanic din as the spinning sphere came in contact with the copper blocks, as force and metal resulted in weird friction.
With a shocking wrench the beams went dead, the scream cut off, the roar was gone. A terrifying silence fell upon the room as soon as the suddenly thunking relays opened automatically.
The sphere was gone! In its place was a tenuous refraction that told where it had been. That and a thin layer of perfectly reflective copper… colorless now, but Manning knew it was copper, for it represented the continuation of the great copper blocks.
His mind felt as if it were racing in neutral, getting nowhere. Within that sphere was the total energy that had been poured out by five gigantic beams, turned on full, for almost a minute's time. Compressed energy! Energy enough to blast these mountains down to the primal rock were it released instantly. Energy trapped and held by virtue of some peculiarity of that little borderline between Force Fields 348 and 349.
Russ walked across the room to a small electric truck with rubber caterpillar treads, driven by a bank of portable accumulators. Skillfully the scientist maneuvered it over to the other side of the room, picked up a steel bar four inches in diameter and five feet long. Holding it by the handler's magnetic crane, he fixed it firmly in the armlike jaws on the front of the machine, then moved the machine into a position straddling the sphere of force.
With smashing momentum the iron jaws thrust downward, driving the steel 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….