Chapter 6

“If we can get television reception with this apparatus of ours,” asked Greg, “what is to prevent us from televising? Why can’t we send as well as receive?”

Russ drew doodles on a calculation sheet. “We could. Just something else to work out. You must remember we’re working in a four-dimensional medium. That would complicate matters a little. Not like working in three dimensions alone. It would...”

He stopped. The pencil fell from his finger and he swung around slowly to face Manning.

“What’s the matter now?” asked Greg.

“Look,” said Russ excitedly. “We’re working in four dimensions. And if we televised through four dimensions, what would we get?”

Greg wrinkled his brow. Suddenly his face relaxed. “You don’t mean we can televise in three dimensions, do you?”

“That’s what it should work out to,” declared Russ. He swung back to the table again, picked up his pencil and jotted down equations. He looked up from the sheet. “Three-dimensional television!” he almost whispered.

“Something new again,” commented Greg.

“I’ll say it’s new!”

Russ reached out and jerked a calculator toward him. Rapidly he set up the equations, pressed the tabulator lever. The machine gurgled and chuckled, clicked out the result. Bending over to read it, Russ sucked in his breath.

“It’s working out right,” he said.

“That’ll mean new equipment, lots of it,” Greg pointed out. “Wilson’s gone, damn him. Who’s going to help us?”

“We’ll do it ourselves,” said Russ. “When we’re the only ones here, we can be sure there won’t be any leak.”

It took hours of work on the math machines, but at the end of that time Russ was certain of his ground.

“Now we go to work,” he said, gleefully.

In a week’s time they had built a triple televisor, but simplifications of the standard commercial set gave them a mechanism that weighed little more and was far more efficient and accurate.

During the time the work went on they maintained a watch over both the office of Spencer Chambers and the laboratory in which Dr. Herbert Craven worked 16 hours a day. Unseen, unsuspected, they were silent companions of the two men during many hours. They read what the men wrote, read what was written to them, heard what they said, saw how they acted. Doing so, the pair in the high mountain laboratory gained a deep insight into the characters of unsuspecting quarries.

“Both utterly ruthless,” declared Greg. “But apparently men who are sincere in thinking that the spoils belong to the strong. Strange, almost outdated men. You can’t help but like Chambers. He’s good enough at heart. He has his pet charities. He really, I believe, wants to help the people. And I think he actually believes the best way to do it is to gain a dictatorship over the Solar System. That ambition rules everything in his life. It has hardened him and strengthened him. He will crush ruthlessly, without a single qualm, anything that stands in his path. That’s why we’ll have a fight on our hands.”

Craven seemed to be making little progress. They could only guess at what he was trying to develop.

“I think,” said Russ, “he’s working on a collector field to suck in radiant energy. If he really gets that, it will be something worth having.”

For hours Craven sat, an intent, untidy, unkempt man, sunk deep in the cushions of an easy chair. His face was calm, with relaxed jaw and eyes that seemed vacant. But each time he would rouse himself from the chair to pencil new notations on the pads of paper that littered his desk. New ideas, new approaches.

The triple televisor was completed except for one thing.

“Sound isn’t so easy,” said Russ. “If we could only find a way to transmit it as well as light.”

“Listen,” said Greg, “why don’t you try a condenser speaker.”

“A condenser speaker?”

“Sure, the gadget developed way back in the 1920s. It hasn’t been used for years to my knowledge, but it might do the trick.”

Russ grinned broadly. “Hell, why didn’t I think of that? Here I’ve been racking my brain for a new approach, a new wrinkle ... and exactly what I wanted was at hand.”

“Should work,” declared Greg. “Just the opposite of a condenser microphone. Instead of radiating sound waves mechanically, it radiates a changing electric field and this field becomes audible directly within the ear. Even yet no one seems to understand just how it works, but it does ... and that’s good enough.”

“I know,” said Russ. “It really makes no sound. In other words it creates an electric field that doubles for sound. It ought to be just the thing because nothing can stop it. Metal shielding can, I guess, if it’s thick enough, but it’s got to be pretty damn thick.”

It took time to set the mechanism up. Ready, the massive apparatus, within which glowed a larger and more powerful force field, was operated by two monstrous material energy engines. The controls were equipped with clockwork drives, designed so that the motion of the Earth could be nullified completely and automatically for work upon outlying planets.