Empire Part 39

He shivered and his hand loosened its hold, dropped away. He was afraid to hasten death. He wanted to put it off. He was afraid of death ...

horribly afraid.

The stars mocked him and he seemed to hear hooting laughter from somewhere far away. Curiously, it sounded like his own laughter....

"I'll make it easy for you, Manning," Chambers said. "I know that all of us are guilty. Guilty in the eyes of the people and the law. Guilty in your eyes. If we had won, there would have been no penalty. There's never a penalty for the one who wins."

"Penalty," said Greg, his eyes half smiling. "Why, yes, I think there is. I'm going to order you aboard the _Invincible_ for something to eat and to get some rest."

"You mean to say that we aren't prisoners?"

Greg shook his head. "Not prisoners," he said. "Why, I came out here to guide you back to Earth. I hauled you out here and got you into this jam. It was up to me to get you out of it. I would have done the same for Stutsman, too, but ..."

He hesitated and looked at Chambers.

Chambers stared back and slowly nodded.

"Yes, Manning," he said. "I think I understand."

_CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE_

Chambers lit his cigar and leaned back in his chair.

"I wish you could see it my way, Manning," he said. "There's no place for me on Earth, no place for me in the Solar System. You see, I tried and failed. I'm just a has-been back there."

He laughed quietly. "Somehow, I can't imagine myself coming back in the role of the defeated tribal leader, chained to your chariot, so to speak."

"But it wouldn't be that way," protested Greg. "Your company is gone, true, and your stocks are worthless, but you haven't lost everything.

You still have a fleet of ships. With our new power, the Solar System will especially need ships. Lots of ships. For the s.p.a.celanes will be filled with commerce. You'd be coming back to a new deal, a new Solar System, a place that has been transformed almost overnight by power that's practically free."

"Yes, yes, I know all that," said Chambers. "But I climbed too high. I got too big. I can't come back now as something small, a failure."

"You have things we need," said Greg. "The screen that blankets out our television and tele-transport, for example. We need your screen as a safeguard against the very thing we have created. Think of what criminal uses could be made of the tele-transport. No vault, no net of charged wires, nothing, could stop a thief from taking anything he wanted.

Prisons would cease to be prisons. Criminals could reach in and pick up their friends, no matter how many guards there were. Prisons and bank vaults and national treasuries could be cleaned out in a single day."

"Then there's the super-saturated s.p.a.ce fields," added Russ, ruefully.

"Those almost got us. If I hadn't thought of moving the televisor through time, we would have had to pull stakes and run for it."

"No, you wouldn't," pointed out Craven. "You could have wiped us out in a moment. You can disintegrate matter. Send it up in a puff of smoke ...

rip every electron apart and send it hurtling away."

"Of course we could have, Craven," said Greg, "but we wouldn't."

Chambers laughed softly. "Not quite mad enough at us to do that, eh?"

Greg looked at him. "I guess that must have been it."

"But I'm curious about the green s.p.a.ce fields," persisted Russ.

"Simple," said Craven. "They were just fields that had more energy packed into a certain portion of s.p.a.ce than s.p.a.ce could take. s.p.a.ce fields that had far more than their share of energy, more than they could hold. A super-saturated solution will crystalize almost immediately onto the tiniest crystal put into it. Those fields acted the same way. They crystalized instantly into hyper-s.p.a.ce the moment they came into contact with other energy, whether as photons of radiation, matter or other s.p.a.ce fields. Your anti-entropy didn't stand a chance under those conditions. When they crystalized, they took a chunk of the field along with them, a small chunk, but one after another they ate a hole right through your screen."

"Something like that would have a commercial value," said Greg. "Useful in war, too, and now that mankind has taken to s.p.a.ce, now that we're spreading out, we must think of possible attack. There must be life on other planets throughout the Galaxy. Someday they'll come. If they don't, someday we'll go to them. And we may need every type of armament we can get our hands on."

Chambers knocked the ash off his cigar and was staring out the vision port. The ship had swung so that through the port could be seen the distant star toward which the _Interplanetarian_ had been driving.

"For my part," said Chambers, slowly, measuring each word, "you can have those findings of ours. We'll give them to you, knowing you will use them as they should be used. Craven can tell you how they work. That is, if Craven wants to. He is the man who developed them."

"Certainly," said Craven. "They'll be something to remember us by."

"But you are coming back with us, aren't you?" asked Greg.

Craven shook his head. "No, I'm going with Chambers. I don't know what he's thinking of, but whatever it is, it's all right with me. We've been together too long. I'd miss someone to fight with."

Chambers was still staring out the vision port. He was talking, but he did not seem to be talking to them.

"I had a dream, you see. I saw the people struggling against the inefficiency and stupidity of popular government. I saw the periodic rise of bad leaders. I saw them lead the people into blunders. I read history and I saw that since the time man had risen from the ape, this had been going on. So I proposed to give the people scientific government ... a business administration. An administration that would have run the government exactly as a successful businessman runs his business. The people would have resented it if I had told them they didn't know how to run their affairs. There was only one way to do it ... gain control and force it down their throats."

Chambers was no longer a beaten man, no longer a man with a white bandage around his head and his power stripped from him. Once again he was the fighting financier who had sat back at the desk in the Interplanetary building on Earth and issued orders ... orders that sped across millions of miles of s.p.a.ce.

He shrugged his shoulders. "They didn't want it. Man doesn't want to live under scientific government. He doesn't want to be protected against blunders. He wants what he calls freedom. The right to do the things he wants to do, even if it means making a d.a.m.n fool of himself.

The right to rise to great heights and tumble to equally low depths.

That's human nature and I ruled it out. But you can't rule out human nature."

They sat in silence, no one speaking. Russ cupped his pipe bowl in his hand and watched Chambers. Chambers leaned back and slowly puffed at the cigar. Greg just sat, his face unchanging.

Craven finally broke the silence. "Just what are you planning to do?"

Chambers flicked his hand toward the distant sun that gleamed through the vision port.

"There's a new solar system out there," he said. "New worlds, a new sun.

A place to start over again. You and I discovered it. It's ours by right of discovery. We'll go there and stake out our claim."

"But there may be nothing there," protested Greg. "That sun is younger than our Sun. The planets may not have cooled as yet. Life may not have developed."

"In such a case," said Chambers, "we shall find another planetary system around another sun. A system that has cooled, where there is life."

Russ gasped. Here was something important, something that should set a precedent. The first men to roam from star to star seeking new worlds.

The first men to turn their backs on the old solar system and strike out in search of new worlds swinging in their paths around distant suns.