_CHAPTER FOUR_
The new apparatus was set up, a machine that almost filled thelaboratory ... a giant, compact mass of heavy, solidly built metal work,tied together by beams of girderlike construction. It was meant to standup under the hammering of unimaginable power, the stress of unknownspatial factors.
Slowly, carefully, Russell Page tapped keys on the control board,setting up an equation. Sucking thoughtfully at his pipe, he checked andrechecked 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 tohappen, what we hope will happen, but we never can be sure. We areworking with conditions that are entirely new."
Sitting beside a table littered with papers, staring at the giganticmachine before him, Gregory Manning said slowly: "That thing simply hasto adapt itself to spaceship drive. There's everything there that'sneeded for space propulsion. Unlimited power from a minimum of fuel.Split-second 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 wemust be getting close to it."
Russ walked from the control board to the table, picked up a sheaf ofpapers and leafed through them. He selected a handful and shook them inhis fist.
"I thought I had it here," he said. "My math must have been wrong, somefactor 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 theLord 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 atconclusions, Wilson."
"The math didn't show that progressive action," said Russ. "It showedrepulsion, negative gravity that could be built up until it would shootthe ship outside the Solar System within an hour's time. Faster thanlight. We don't know how many times faster."
"Forget it," advised Greg. "The way it stands, it's useless. You getrepulsion by progressive steps. A series of squares with one constantfactor. It wouldn't be any good for space travel. Imagine trying to useit on a spaceship. You'd start with a terrific jolt. The accelerationwould fade and just when you were recovering from the first jolt, you'dget a second one and that second one would iron you out. A spaceshipcouldn't take it, let alone a human body."
* * * * *
"Maybe this will do it," said Wilson hopefully.
"Maybe," agreed Russ. "Anyhow we'll try it. Equation 578."
"It might do the trick," said Greg. "It's a new approach to the gravityangle. The equation explains the shifting of gravitational lines, thechanging and contortion of their direction. Twist gravity and you have aperfect space drive. As good as negative gravity. Better, perhaps, moreeasily controlled. Would make for more delicate, precise handling."
Russ laid down the sheaf of papers, lit his pipe and walked to theapparatus.
"Here goes," he said.
His hand went out to the power lever, eased it in. With a roar thematerial energy engine built within the apparatus surged into action,sending a flow of power through the massive leads. The thunder mountedin the room. The laboratory seemed to shudder with the impact.
Wilson, watching intently, cried out, a brief, choked-off cry. A wave ofdizziness engulfed him. The walls seemed to be falling in. The room andthe machine were blurring. Russ, at the controls, seemed horriblydisjointed. Manning was a caricature of a man, a weird, strange figurethat moved and gestured in the mad room.
Wilson fought against the dizziness. He tried to take a step and thefloor seemed to leap up and meet his outstretched foot, throwing him offbalance. His cigarette fell out of his mouth, rolled along the floor.
Russ was shouting something, but the words were distorted, loud oneinstant, rising over the din of the apparatus, a mere whisper the next.They made no sense.
There was a peculiar whistling in the air, a sound such as he had neverheard before. It seemed to come from far away, a high, thin shriek thatwas torture in one's ears.
Giddy, seized with deathly nausea, Wilson clawed his way across thefloor, swung open the laboratory door and stumbled outdoors. He weavedacross the lawn and clung to a sun dial, panting.
He looked back at the laboratory and gasped in disbelief. All the treeswere bent toward the building, as if held by some mighty wind. Theirbranches straining, every single leaf standing at rigid attention, thetrees were bending in toward the structure. _But there was no wind._
And then he noticed something else. No matter where the trees stood, nomatter in what direction from the laboratory, they all bent inwardtoward the building ... and the whining, thundering, shrieking machine.
Inside the laboratory an empty bottle crashed off a table and smashedinto a thousand fragments. The tinkling of the broken glass was asilvery, momentary sound that protested against the blasting thrum ofpower that shook the walls.
Manning fought along the floor to Russ's side. Russ roared in his ear:"Gravitational control! Concentration of gravitational lines!"
The papers on the desk started to slide, slithering onto the floor,danced a crazy dervish across the room. Liquids in the laboratorybottles were climbing the sides of glass, instead of lying at restparallel with the floor. A chair skated, bucking and tipping crazily,toward the door.
* * * * *
Russ jerked the power lever back to zero. The power hum died. Theliquids slid back to their natural level, the chair tipped over and laystill, papers fluttered gently downward.
The two men looked at one another across the few feet of floor spacebetween them. Russ wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead withhis shirt sleeve. He sucked on his pipe, but it was dead.
"Greg," Russ said jubilantly, "we have something better thananti-gravity! We have something you might call _positive_ gravity ...gravity that we can control. Your grandfather nullified gravity. We'vegone him one better."
Greg gestured toward the machine. "You created an attraction center.What else?"
"But the center itself is not actually an attracting force. The fourthdimension is mixed up in this. We have a sort of fourth-dimensional lensthat concentrates the lines of any gravitational force. Concentration inthe fourth dimension turns the force loose in three dimensions, but wecan take care of that by using mirrors of our anti-entropy. We canarrange it so that it turns the force loose in only one dimension."
Greg was thoughtful for a moment. "We can guide a ship by a series oflenses," he declared at last. "But here's the really important thing.That field concentrates the forces of gravity already present. Thoseforces exist throughout all of space. There are gravitational lineseverywhere. We can concentrate them in any direction we want to. Inreality, we fall toward the body which originally caused the force ofgravitation, not to the concentration."
* * * * *
Russ nodded. "That means we can create a field immediately ahead of theship. The ship would fall into it constantly, with the concentrationmoving on ahead. The field would tend to break down in proportion to thestrain imposed and a big ship, especially when you are building upspeed, would tend to enlarge it, open it up. But the field could be kepttight by supplying energy and we have plenty of that ... far more thanwe'd ever need. We supply the energy, but that's only a small part ofit. The body emitting the gravitational force supplies the fulcrum thatmoves us along."
"It would operate beyond the planets," said Greg. "It would operateequally well anywhere in space, for all of space is filled withgravitational stress. We could use gravitational bodies many light yearsaway as the driver of our ships."
A half-wild light glowed momentarily in his eyes.
"Russ," he said, "we're going to put spa
ce fields to work at last."
He walked to the chair, picked it up and sat down in it.
"We'll start building a ship," he stated, "just as soon as we know themechanics of this gravity concentration and control. Russ, we'll buildthe greatest ship, the fastest ship, the most powerful ship the SolarSystem has ever known!"
* * * * *
"Damn," said Russ, "that thing's slipped again."
He glared at the offending nut. "I'll put a lock washer on it thistime."
Wilson stepped toward the control board. From his perch on theapparatus, Russ motioned him away.
"Never mind discharging the field," he said. "I can get around itsomehow."
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 thescientist. "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 itoff and slipped on the washer. Viciously he tightened it home. Thewrench stuck.
Gritting his teeth on the bit of his pipe, Russ cursed soundlessly. Heyanked savagely at the wrench. It slipped from his hand, hung for aminute on the nut and then plunged downward, falling straight into theheart of the new force field they had developed.
Russ froze and watched, his heart in his throat, mad thoughts in hisbrain. In a flash, as the wrench fell, he remembered that they knewnothing about this field. All they knew was that any matter introducedin 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! Butsomething else might happen, too, something entirely unguessable.
The wrench fell only a few feet, but it seemed to take long seconds asRuss watched, frozen in fascination.
He saw it strike the hazy glow that defined the limits of the field, sawit floating down, as if its speed had been slowed by some dense medium.
In the instant that hazy glow intensified a thousand times--became ablinding sun-burst! Russ ducked his head, shielded his eyes from theterrible 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 clangingthud 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 floorabove.
Russ turned around and stared at Wilson. Wilson stared back, his mouthhanging 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, acalculation 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. Itbecame an 'instantaneous wrench'."
"Nothing new in that," said Greg, unruffled.
"But there is," persisted Russ. "The field collapsed, you see. Maybe thewrench was too big for it to handle. And when the field collapsed thewrench 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 heardthe thump. There was nothing on the floor. They searched the room fromend to end, then the other rooms. There was no wrench.
At the end of an hour Greg went back to the main laboratory, broughtback 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 wasthe shadow of the wrench.
"Fourth dimension," he said. "Transported in time."
The muscles in Greg's cheeks were tensed, that old flame of excitementburning in his eyes, but otherwise his face was the mask of old, thecalm, 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 thingwe'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 toothof mine is getting worse."
"Sure, can't keep an aching tooth," agreed Russ, thinking of the wrenchwhile talking.
"Can I take your ship?" asked Wilson.
"Sure," said Russ.
Back in the laboratory they rebuilt the field, dropped little ballbearings in it. The ball bearings disappeared. They found themeverywhere--in the walls, in tables, in the floor. Some, still existingin their new time-dimension, hung in mid-air, invisible, intangible, butthere.
Hours followed hours, with the sheet of data growing. Math machineswhirred and chuckled and clicked. Wilson departed for San Francisco withhis aching tooth. The other two worked on. By dawn they knew what theywere doing. Out of the chaos of happenstance they were finding rules oforder, certain formulas of behavior, equations of force.
The next day they tried heavier, more complicated things and learnedstill more.
A radiogram, phoned from the nearest spaceport, forty miles distant,informed them that Wilson would not be back for a few days. His toothwas worse than he had thought, required an operation and treatment ofthe jaw.
"Hell," said Russ, "just when he could be so much help."
With Wilson gone the two of them tackled the controlling device, laboredand 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 anyplace we want. Not only that, we can pick up any object from anindefinite 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 histop form. The sinners' bench was crowded. Then suddenly, as theevangelist paused for a moment's silence before he drove home animportant point, the music came. Music from the air. Music fromsomewhere in the sky. The soft, heavenly music of a hymn. As if anangels' chorus were singing in the blue.
The evangelist froze, one arm pointing upward, with index finger readyto sweep down and emphasize his point. The sinners kneeling at the benchwere petrified. The congregation was astounded.
The hymn rolled on, punctuated, backgrounded by deep celestial organnotes. The clear voice of the choir swept high to a bell-like note.
"Behold!" shrieked the evangelist. "Behold, a miracle! Angels singingfor us! Kneel! Kneel and pray!"
Nobody stood.
* * * * *
Andy McIntyre was drunk again. In the piteous glare of mid-morning, hestaggered homeward from the poker party in the back of Steve Abram'sharness 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 hebacked away, intent on making another try. Suddenly the tree spoke tohim:
"Alcohol is the scourge of mankind. It turns men into beasts. It robsthem 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 ofwomen and children. Fosters crime. Weakens the moral fiber of thenation."
"Stop!" screamed Andy. "Stop, I tell you!"
The tree stopped talking. All he could hear was the whisper of windamong 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 tolay off the bottle!"
* * * * *
In another town fifty miles distant from the one in which the tree hadtalked to Andy McIntyre, another miracle happened that same Sundaymorning.
Dozens of people heard the bronze statue of the soldier in the courtyardspeak. The statue did not come to life. It stood as ever, a solid pieceof golden bronze, in spots turned black and green by weather. But fromits lips came words ... words that burned themselves into the souls ofthose who heard. Words that exhorted them to defend the principles forwhich many men had died, to grasp and hold high the torch of democracyand liberty.
In somber bitterness, the statue called Spencer Chambers the greatestthreat to that liberty and freedom. For, the statue said, SpencerChambers and Interplanetary Power were waging an economic war, abloodless one, but just as truly war as if there were cannons firing andbombs exploding.
For a full five minutes the statue spoke and the crowd, growing by theminute, stood dumbfounded.
Then silence fell over the courtyard. The statue stood as before,unmoving, its timeless eyes staring out from under the ugly helmet, itshands gripping the bayoneted rifle. A blue and white pigeon flutteredsoftly down, alighted on the bayonet, looked the crowd over and thenflew 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 instatues and trees without interfering with its operation, why can't wedo 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 withinthe field and a receptor screen set up in the laboratory.
The two moved chairs in front of the screen and sat down. Russ reachedout 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 almostinstantaneous. It travels in a time dimension and any speed slower thaninstantaneity is a modification of that force field."
On the screen swam a panorama of the mountains, mile after mile ofsnow-capped peaks and valleys ablaze with the flames of autumn foliage.The mountains faded away. There was desert now and then a city. Russdropped the televisor set lower, down into a street. For half an hourthey sat comfortably in their chairs and watched men and women walking,witnessed one dog fight, cruised slowly up and down, looking intowindows of homes, window-shopping in the business section.
"There's just one thing wrong," said Greg. "We can see everything, butwe can't hear a sound."
"We can fix that," Russ told him.
He lifted the televisor set from the streets, brought it back across thedesert and mountains into the laboratory.
"We have two practical applications now," said Greg. "Space drive andtelevision spying. I don't know which is the best. Do you realize thatwith this television trick there isn't a thing that can be hidden fromus?"
"I believe we can go to Mars or Mercury or anywhere we want to with thisthing. It doesn't seem to have any particular limits. It handlesperfectly. You can move it a fraction of an inch as easily as a hundredmiles. And it's fast. Almost instantaneous. Not quite, for even withour acceleration within time, there is a slight lag."
By evening they had an audio apparatus incorporated in the set, hadwired the screen for sound.
"Let's put this to practical use," suggested Greg. "There's a show atthe New Mercury Theater in New York I've been wanting to see. Let'sknock off work and take in that show."
"Now," said Russ, "you really have an idea. The ticket scalpers arecharging a fortune, and it won't cost us a cent to get in!"