EMPIRE (14 page)

Mallory’s face lost its expression of bewilderment, suddenly lighted with realization. But his voice was harsh and bitter.

“You came too late. I can’t help you. Remember, I’m in a prison ship from which no one can escape. You have to do what you can . . . you must do what you can. But I can’t be with you.”

Manning strode forward. “You don’t get the idea at all. I said I’d get you out of here and I’m going to. I could pick up this ship and put it wherever I wanted. But I don’t want to. I just want you.”

Mallory stared at him.

“Just don’t be startled,” said Greg. “Something will happen soon. Get ready for it.”

Feet drummed on the metal corridor outside.

“Hey, you, pipe down!” yelled the voice of the guard. “You know there’s no talking allowed now. Go to sleep.”

“That’s the guard,” Mallory whispered fiercely. “They’ll stop us.”

Greg grinned viciously. “No, they won’t.”

The
guard came into view through the grilled door.

“So it’s you, Mallory . . .” he began, stopping in amazement. “Hey, you!” he shouted at Greg. “Who are you? How did you get in that cell?”

Greg flipped a hand in greeting. “Pleasant evening, isn’t it?”

The guard grabbed for the door, but he did not reach the bars. Some force stopped him six inches away. It could not be seen, could not be felt, but his straining against it accomplished nothing.

“Mallory and I are leaving,” Greg told the guard. “We don’t like it here. Too stuffy.”

The guard lifted a whistle and blew a blast. Feet pounded outside. A prisoner yelled from one of the cells. Another catcalled. Instantly the ship was in an uproar. The convicts took up the yammering, shaking the bars on their doors.

“Let’s get started,” Greg said to Mallory. “Hold tight.”

Blackness engulfed Mallory. He felt a peculiar twisting wrench. And then he was standing in the control room of a ship and Gregory Manning and another man were smiling at him. White light poured down from a cluster of globes. Somewhere in the ship engines purred with the hum of power. The air was fresh and pure, making him realize how foul and stale the air of the prison ship had been.

Greg held out his hand. “Welcome to our ship.”

Mallory gripped his hand, blinking in the light. “Where am I?”

“You are on the
Invincible
, five million miles off Callisto.”

“But were you here all the time?” asked Mallory. “Were you in my cell back there or weren’t you?”

“I was really in your cell,” Greg assured him. “I could have just thrown my image there, but I went there personally to get you. Russ Page, here, sent me out. When I gave him the signal, he brought both of us back.”

“I’m glad you’re with us,” Russ said. “Perhaps you’d like a cup of coffee, something to eat.”

Mallory stammered. “Why, I really would.” He laughed. “Rations weren’t too good in the prison ship.”

They sat down while Russ rang the galley for coffee and sandwiches.

Crisply, Greg informed Mallory of the situation.

“We want to start manufacturing these engines as soon as possible,” he explained, “but I haven’t even dared to patent them. Chambers would simply buy out the officials if I tried it on Earth, delay the patent for a few days and then send through papers copied from ours. You know what he’d do with it if he got the patent rights. He’d scrap it and the old accumulator business would go on as always. If I tried it on any other world, with any other government, he’d see that laws were passed to block us. He’d probably instruct the courts to rule against the manufacture of the engines on the grounds that they were dangerous.”

Mallory’s face was grave. “There’s only one answer,” he said. “With the situation on the worlds, with this purge you told me about, there’s only one thing to do. We have to act at once. Every minute we wait gives Stutsman just that much longer to tighten his hold.”

“And that answer?” asked Russ.

“Revolution,” said Mallory. “Simultaneous revolution in the Jovian confederacy, on Mars and Venus. Once free, the planets will stay free with your material energy engines. Spencer Chambers and his idea of Solar System domination will be too late.”

Greg’s
forehead was wrinkled in thought, his facial muscles tensed.

“First thing to do,” he said, “is to contact all the men we can find . . . men we can rely on to help us carry out our plans. We’ll need more televisor machines, more teleport machines, some for use on Mars and Venus, others for the Jovian moons. We will have to bring the men here to learn to operate them. It’ll take a few days. We’ll get some men to work on new machines right away.”

He started to rise from his chair, but at that moment the coffee and sandwiches arrived.

Greg grinned. “We may as well eat first.”

Mallory looked grateful and tried to keep from wolfing the food. The others pretended not to notice.

* * * *

Grim
hours followed, an unrelenting search over two planets and four moons for men whom Mallory considered loyal to his cause — men willing to risk their lives to throw off the yoke of Interplanetary.

They were hard to find. Many of them were dead, victims of the purge. The others were in hiding and word of them was difficult to get.

But slowly, one by one, they were ferreted out, the plan explained to them, and then, by means of the tele-transport, they were brought to the
Invincible
.

Hour after hour men worked, stripped to their waists, in the glaring inferno of terrible force fields, fashioning new television units. As fast as the sets were constructed, they were placed in operation.

The work went faster than could be expected, yet it was maddeningly slow.

For with the passing of each hour, Stutsman clamped tighter his iron grip on the planets. Concentration camps were filled to overflowing. Buildings were bombed and burned. Murders and executions were becoming too common to be news.

Then suddenly there was a new development.

“Greg, Craven has found something!” Russ cried. “I can’t get him!”

Supervising the installation of a new televisor set, Greg spun around. “What’s that?”

“Craven! I can’t reach him. He’s blocking me out!”

Greg helped, but the apparatus was unable to enter the Interplanetary building in New York. Certain other portions of the city adjacent to the building also were blanketed out. In all the Solar System, the Interplanetary building was the only place they could not enter, except the Sun itself.

Craven had developed a field from which their field shied off. The televisor seemed to roll off it like a drop of mercury. That definitely ended all spying on Craven and Chambers.

Russ mopped his brow, sucked at his dead pipe.

“Light penetrates it,” he said. “Matter penetrates it, electricity, all ordinary forces. But this field won’t. It’s . . . well, whatever Craven has is similarly dissimilar. The same thing of opposite nature. It repels our field, but doesn’t affect anything else. That means he has analyzed our fields. We have Wilson to thank for this.”

Greg nodded gravely. “There’s just one thing to be thankful for,” he declared. “He probably isn’t any nearer our energy than he was before. But now we can’t watch him. And that field of his shows that he has tremendous power of some sort.”

“We can’t watch him, but we can follow him,” corrected Russ. “He can’t shake us. None of them can. The mechanical shadow will take care of that. I have one for Craven with a bit of ‘bait’ off his spectacles and he’ll keep those spectacles, never fear. He’s blind as a bat without them. And we can track Chambers with his ring.”

“That’s right,” agreed Greg, “but we’ve got to speed up. Craven is getting under way now. If he does this, he can do something else. Something that will really hurt us. The man’s clever . . . too damn clever.”

A miracle
came to pass in Ranthoor when a man for whom all hope had been abandoned suddenly appeared within the city’s streets. But he appeared to be something not quite earthly, for he did not have the solidity of a man. He was pale, like a wraith from out of space, and one could see straight through him, yet he still had all the old mannerisms and tricks.

In frightened, awe-stricken whispers the word was spread . . . the spirit of John Moore Mallory had come back to the city once again. He bulked four times the height of a normal man and there was that singular ghostliness about him. From where he had come, or how, or why, no one seemed to know.

But when he reached the steps of the federation’s administration building and walked straight through a line of troopers that suddenly massed to bar his way, and when he turned on those steps and spoke to the people who had gathered, there was none to doubt that at last a sign had come. The sign that now, if ever, was the time to avenge the purge. Now the time to take vengeance for the blood that flowed in gutters, for the throaty chortling of the flame guns that had snuffed out lives against a broad steel wall.

Standing on the steps, shadowy but plainly visible, John Moore Mallory talked to the people in the square below, and his voice was the voice they remembered. They saw him toss his black mane of hair, they saw his clenched fist raised in terrible anger, they heard the boom of the words he spoke.

Like a shrilling alarm the words spread through the city, reverberating from the dome, seeking out those who were in hiding. From every corner of the city, from its deepest cellars and its darkest alleys, poured out a mass of humanity that surrounded the capitol and blackened the square and the converging streets with a mob that shrieked its hatred, bellowed its anger.

“Power!” thundered the mighty shadow on the steps. “Power to burn! Power to give away. Power to heat the dome, to work your mines, to drive your spaceships!”

“Power!” answered the voice of the crowd. “Power!” It sounded like a battle cry.

“No more accumulators,” roared the towering image. “Never again need you rely on Spencer Chambers for your power. Callisto is yours. Ranthoor is yours.”

The black crowd surged forward, reached the steps and started to climb, wild cheers in their throat, the madness of victory in their eyes. Up the steps came men with nothing but bare hands, screaming women, jeering children.

Officers snapped orders at the troops that lined the steps, but the troopers, staring into the awful, raging maw of that oncoming crowd, dropped their guns and fled, back into the capitol building, with the mob behind them, shrilling blood lust and long-awaited vengeance.

* * * *

Out
of the red and yellow wilderness of the deserts, a man came to Sandebar on Mars. He had long been thought dead. The minions of the government had announced that he was dead. But he had been in hiding for six years.

His beard was long and gray, his eyes were curtained by hardship, his white hair hung about his shoulders and he was clothed in the tattered leather trappings of the spaceways.

But men remembered him.

Tom Brown had lead the last revolt against the Martian government, an ill-starred revolt that ended almost before it started when the troopers turned loose the heavy heaters and swept the streets with washing waves of flame.

When he climbed to the base of a statue in Techor Park to address the crowd that gathered, the police shouted for him to come down and he disregarded them. They climbed the statue to reach him and their hands went through him.

Tom Brown stood before the people, in plain view, and spoke, but he wasn’t there!

Other things happened in Sandebar that day. A voice spoke out of thin air, a voice that told the people the reign of Interplanetary was over. It told of a mighty new source of power. Power that would cost almost nothing. Power that would make the accumulators unnecessary . . . would make them out of date. A voice that said the people need no longer submit to the yoke of Spencer Chambers’ government in order to obtain the power they needed.

There was no one there . . . no one visible at all. And yet that voice went on and on. A great crowd gathered, listening, cheering. The police tried to break it up and failed. The troops were ordered out and the people fought them until the voice told them to disband peaceably and go to their homes.

Throughout Mars it was the same.

In a dozen places in Sandebar the voice spoke. It spoke in a dozen places, out of empty air, in Malacon and Alexon and Adebron.

Tom Brown, vanishing into the air after his speech was done, reappeared a few minutes later in Adebron and there the police, warned of what had happened in Sandebar, opened fire upon him when he stood on a park bench to address the people. But the flames passed through and did not touch him. Tom Brown, his long white beard covering his chest, his mad eyes flashing, stood in the fiery blast that bellowed from the muzzles of the flame rifles and calmly talked.

* * * *

The
chief of police at New Chicago, Venus, called the police commissioner. “There’s a guy out here in the park, just across the street. He’s preaching treason. He’s telling the people to overthrow the government.”

In the ground glass the police commissioner’s face grew purple.

“Arrest him,” he ordered the chief. “Clap him in the jug. Do you have to call me up every time one of those fiery-eyed boys climbs a soap box? Run him in.”