It was Gregory Manning who had financed and headed the rescue expedition which took the first Pluto flight off that dark icebox of a world when the exploration ship had crashed. It was he who had piloted home the winning ship in the Jupiter derby, sending his bulleting craft screaming around the mighty planet in a time which set a Solar record. It was Gregory Manning who had entered the Venusian swamps and brought back, alive, the mystery lizard that had been reported there. And he was the one who had flown the serum to Mercury when the lives of ten thousand men depended upon the thrumming engines that drove the shining ship inward toward the Sun.

Russell Page had known him since college days. They had worked out their experiments together in the school laboratories, had spent long hours arguing and wondering ... debating scientific theories. Both had loved the same girl, both had lost her, and together they had been bitter over it ... drowning their bitterness in a three-day drunk that made campus history.

After graduation Gregory Manning had gone on to world fame, had roamed over the face of every planet except Jupiter and Saturn, had visited every inhabited moon, had climbed Lunar mountains, penetrated Venusian swamps, crossed Martian deserts, driven by a need to see and experience that would not let him rest. Russell Page had sunk into obscurity, had buried himself in scientific research, coming more and more to aim his effort at the discovery of a new source of power ... power that would be cheap, that would destroy the threat of Interplanetary dictatorship.

Page turned away from the rectifier room.

"Maybe I'll have something to show Greg soon," he told himself. "Maybe, after all these years...."

Forty minutes after Page put through the call to Chicago, Gregory Manning arrived. The scientist, watching for him from the tiny lawn that surrounded the combined home and laboratory, saw his plane bullet into sight, scream down toward the little field and make a perfect landing.

Hurrying toward the plane as Gregory stepped out of it, Russell noted that his friend looked the same as ever, though it had been a year or more since he had seen him. The thing that was discomfiting about Greg was his apparently enduring youthfulness.

He was clad in jodhpurs and boots and an old tweed coat, with a brilliant blue stock at his throat. He waved a hand in greeting and hurried forward. Russ heard the grating of his boots across the gravel of the walk.

Greg's face was bleak; it always was. A clean, smooth face, hard, with something stern about the eyes.

His grip almost crushed Russ's hand, but his tone was crisp. "You sounded excited, Russ."

"I have a right to be," said the scientist. "I think I have found something at last."

"Atomic power?" asked Manning. There was no flutter of excitement in his voice, just a little hardening of the lines about his eyes, a little tensing of the muscles in his cheeks.

Russ shook his head. "Not atomic energy. If it's anything, it's material energy, the secret of the energy of matter."

They halted before two lawn chairs.

"Let's sit down here," invited Russ. "I can tell it to you out here, show it to you afterward. It isn't often I can be outdoors."

"It is a fine place," said Greg. "I can smell the pines."

The laboratory perched on a ledge of rugged rock, nearly 7,000 feet above sea level. Before them the land swept down in jagged ruggedness to a valley far below, where a stream flashed in the noonday sun. Beyond climbed pine-clad slopes and far in the distance gleamed shimmering spires of snow-capped peaks.

From his leather jacket Russ hauled forth his pipe and tobacco, lighted up.

"It was this way," he said. Leaning back comfortably he outlined the first experiment. Manning listened intently.

"Now comes the funny part," Russ added. "I had hopes before, but I believe this is what put me on the right track. I took a metal rod, a welding rod, you know. I pushed it into that solidified force field, if that is what you'd call it ... although that doesn't describe it. The rod went in. Took a lot of pushing, but it went in. And though the field seemed entirely transparent, you couldn't see the rod, even after I had pushed enough of it in so it should have come out the other side. It was as if it hadn't entered the sphere of force at all. As if I were just telescoping the rod and its density were increasing as I pushed, like pushing it back into itself, but that, of course, wouldn't have been possible."

He paused and puffed at his pipe, his eyes fixed on the snowy peaks far in the purple distance. Manning waited.

"Finally the rod came out," Russ went on. "Mind you, it came out, even after I would have sworn, if I had relied alone upon my eyes, that it hadn't entered the sphere at all. _But it came out ninety degrees removed from its point of entry!_"

"Wait a second," said Manning. "This doesn't check. Did you do it more than once?"

"I did it a dozen times and the results were the same each time. But you haven't heard the half of it. When I pulled that rod out--yes, I could pull it out--it was a good two inches shorter than when I had pushed it in. I couldn't believe that part of it. It was even harder to believe than that the rod should come out ninety degrees from its point of entry. I measured the rods after that and made sure. Kept an accurate record. Every single one of them lost approximately two inches by being shoved into the sphere. Every single one of them repeated the phenomenon of curving within the sphere to come out somewhere else than where I had inserted them."

"Any explanation of it?" asked Manning, and now there was a cold chill of excitement in his voice.

"Theories, no real explanations. Remember that you can't see the rod after you push it into the sphere. It's just as if it isn't there.

Well, maybe it isn't. You can't disturb anything within that sphere or you'd change the sum of potential-kinetic-pressure energies within it.

The sphere seems dedicated to that one thing ... it cannot change. If the rod struck the imperm wire within the field, it would press the wire down, would use up energy, decrease the potential energy. So the rod simply had to miss it somehow. I believe it _moved into some higher plane of existence and went around_. And in doing that it had to turn so many corners, so many fourth-dimensional corners, that the length was used up. Or maybe it was increased in density. I'm not sure. Perhaps no one will ever know."

"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. Gla.s.s can be forced through it without breaking. Not flexible gla.s.s, but rods of plain old brittle gla.s.s. 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 acc.u.mulator battery, five power leads were aimed at it, centered in the s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 t.i.tanic 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 acc.u.mulators.

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."