Empire | Page 3

slightest trace
of any. It gave the idiot the same political standing as the wise man, the
crackpot the same political opportunity as the man of well-grounded
common sense, the weakling the same voice as the strong man. It was
government by emotion rather than by judgment.
* * *
Spencer Chambers' face took on stern lines. There was no softness left
now. The late afternoon sunlight painted angles and threw shadows and
created highlights that made him look almost like a granite mask on a
solid granite body.
There was no room for Mallory's nonsense in a dynamic, expanding
civilization. No reason to kill him--even he might have value under
certain circumstances, and no really efficient executive destroys
value--but he had to be out of the way where his mob-rousing tongue
could do no damage. The damned fool! What good would his idiotic
idealism do him on a prison spaceship?
CHAPTER TWO
Russell Page squinted thoughtful eyes at the thing he had created--a
transparent cloud, a visible, sharply outlined cloud of something. It was
visible as a piece of glass is visible, as a globe of water is visible. There
it lay, within his apparatus, a thing that shouldn't be.
"I believe we have something there, Harry," he said slowly.
Harry Wilson sucked at the cigarette that drooped from the corner of
his mouth, blew twin streams of smoke from his nostrils. His eyes
twitched nervously.
"Yeah," he said. "Anti-entropy."
"All of that," said Russell Page. "Perhaps a whole lot more."

"It stops all energy change," said Wilson, "as if time stood still and
things remained exactly as they were when time had stopped."
"It's more than that," Page declared. "It conserves not only energy in
toto, not only the energy of the whole, but the energy of the part. It is
perfectly transparent, yet it has refractive qualities. It won't absorb light
because to do so would change its energy content. In that field,
whatever is hot stays hot, whatever is cold can't gain heat."
He scraped his hand over a week's growth of beard, considering. From
his pocket he took a pipe and a leather pouch. Thoughtfully he filled
the pipe and lit it.
It had started with his experiments in Force Field 348, an experiment to
observe the effects of heating a conductor in that field. It had been
impossible to heat the conductor electrically, for that would have upset
the field, changed it, twisted it into something else. So he had used a
bunsen burner.
Through half-closed eyes, he still could see that slender strand of
imperm wire, how its silvery length had turned to red under the blue
flame. Deep red at first and then brighter until it flamed in almost
white-hot incandescence. And all the while the humming of the
transformer as the force field built up. The humming of the transformer
and the muted roaring of the burner and the glowing heat in the length
of wire.
Something had happened then... an awesome something. A weird
wrench as if some greater power, some greater law had taken hold. A
glove of force, invisible, but somehow sensed, had closed about the
wire and flame. Instantly the roaring of the burner changed in tone; an
odor of gas spewed out of the vents at its base. Something had cut off
the flow of flame in the brass tube. Some force, something...
The flame was a transparent cloud. The blue and red of flame and hot
wire had changed, in the whiplash of a second, to a refractive but
transparent cloud that hung there within the apparatus.

* * *
The red color had vanished from the wire as the blue had vanished from
the flame. The wire was shining. It wasn't silvery, it wasn't white. There
was no hint of color, just a refractive blur that told him the wire was
there. Colorless reflection. And that meant perfect reflection! The most
perfect reflectors reflect little more than 98 per cent of the light incident
and the absorption of the two per cent colors those reflectors as copper
or gold or chromium. But the imperm wire within that force field that
had been flame a moment before, was reflecting all light.
He had cut the wire with a pair of shears and it had still hung,
unsupported, in the air, unchanging within the shimmer that constituted
something no man had ever seen before.
"You can't put energy in," said Page, talking to himself, chewing the bit
of his pipe. "You can't take energy out. It's still as hot as it was at the
moment the change came. But it can't radiate any of that heat. It can't
radiate any kind of energy."
Why, even the wire was reflective, so that it couldn't absorb energy and
thus disturb