Gold

by Clyde Crane Campbell

Illustrated by Elliot Dold

SOLOMON NESS slammed the door behind him. The two men sitting at the table in the small room behind the pawnshop started slightly. Grinning triumphantly, Ness threw down a chamois pouch on the crude deal table.

“Again!” Ness announced gloatingly. “Two ounces and six pennyweights. Every day for the past two weeks he’s brought in exactly the same amount.”

Caine cleared his throat huskily. “Is that why you asked us to come here?”

“Certainly!”

Ness pulled up a chair.

“This guy’s name is Lloyd Walsh, about thirty years old, fairly tall, and kind of muscular. But he don’t look like nothing much but a college boy, maybe, or a salesman—”

“Cut the description!” Harding barked.

Ness glanced from one to the other. He saw their hard, sharp faces; he saw greed and impatience, yet he cringed and sought to pacify them. They were money. Ness had money, but he wanted to be money, and they could make him so.

“Well, every day he gives me a lump of gold—two ounces and six pennyweights of it—and I give him six ten-spots. Then he goes out without saying a word.”

Caine pursed his lips tightly. He glanced at Harding and back again at the chamois pouch. “Is it good gold?” he grated.

“What do you think?” Ness was offended.

With fumbling fingers he untied the knot and emptied the pouch onto the table. A gleaming, perfect cube of yellow metal dropped out. He pulled out a ring of thin spatulas, fastened like keys to the ring, and rubbed three of them on a black piece of slate. They left yellow marks, varying in heaviness.

“You know the test for gold,” Ness said. “The purer the metal is, the heavier the mark it leaves. Twenty-four-carat gold smears like butter. This is twenty-four carat.” He pressed the last spatula on the slate and rubbed lightly.

“Now,” he said, drawing the block of gold across the bottom of the slate.

It left a thick streak. Harding and Caine twisted uneasily in their straight-backed chairs and pursed their thick lips more tightly.

The bold streak leered at them. All three had an inordinate fondness for all sorts of money, but this was gold. And gold was more than money—it was power, and its touch was luxurious and caressing. Gold was beauty concentrated that a man might grasp it and fondle it.

“It’s absolutely pure,” Ness whispered, as befitted a hymn in praise of the god. “There isn’t a grain of anything but gold.”

With a new reverence they caressed it with their eyes.

“Where does he get it?” Caine asked.

Ness spread his thick hands palm upward on the table and added a shrug to express his complete lack of knowledge.

“Well, where can he get it from?” Harding demanded impatiently.

Fishing a cigarette and match from his wrinkled jacket of shiny black alpaca, Ness cocked a quizzical eye at the two burly money men.

“I had him trailed for three days,” he said at length. “He’s got the entire third floor of a factory building on Fourth Avenue, not far from 23rd Street. He lives there. Got a whole mess of machinery in the loft, enough to fill a power plant.

“We checked up on his mail. He don’t get no packages at all and mighty few letters. When he does go out, he drifts over to the Mechanics’ Library. No friends in the city. Hardly goes out, and, when he does, he either drops in at the library, or brings his two ounces and six pennyweights of gold to me.”

Caine drummed on the table. “But where does he get it?” he insisted.

“You know as well as I do.” Ness waved his hand vaguely.

Harding looked a little bewilderedly at the cube of pure gold. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m not a scientist or a mathematician,” Caine said. “But I can put two and two together, and I see only one answer.”

Hopefully, the others looked toward him for the solution.

“He makes it!” Caine said.

Ness and Harding cackled depressingly. Angrily, Caine jumped to his feet and pounded the table with his fat, white hand.

“Laugh, you idiots!” he bellowed. “I say he makes it!”

Ness quieted down at the vehemence of Caine’s insistence. “What makes you so sure?”

“It stands to reason, don’t it? He comes in here with two ounces of solid, pure gold that he don’t get in the mail, or from any one else. He’s got a whole floor of a building stuffed with machinery. He knows chemistry and physics and all that stuff. What’s to prevent him from making gold?”

The two others sat silent, numbed by Caine’s logic. Harding cocked his huge bald head to one side and thoughtfully studied the little cube of perfectly pure gold. His over-red lips were tightened painfully.

“Maybe he’s right,” he said to Ness cautiously. “We can find out easy enough.”

CONCRETE FLOORS are hard. A truism, Lloyd Walsh thought, and one of the more unnecessary ones; nevertheless, concrete was hard on the feet, he had to admit to himself, particularly when he had to dash about from one machine to another without ceasing.

He forced himself to plod from machine to machine, knowing he was too tired to exert the amount of speed necessary to gain success. Though his feet ached interminably, though his hands shook with nervous exhaustion, and his eyes were nearly blind with strain, he plodded on and on.

His lungs pumped furiously in the ozone-filled air; his eyes smarted and his nose burned incessantly with the sharp gas. And his knees wabbled so that he bumped into machines he could not see. Automatically he poured oil into grooves and pockets, and opened and closed circuits, adjusted pressure gauges, and kept increasing the power.

Pressure and superheat piled unbelievably high.

Tired—tired!

His nerves screamed for rest; yet he forced himself to go on and on, until everything was a black haze of constant motion, and still he staggered from machine to machine, pouring his oil and opening and closing circuits.

Two hours went by—no one could know how slowly—before he was permitted to open the pressure box and strain his protesting eyes in the gloom at the cube of white-hot metal. Carefully, he picked up the glowing cube with long tongs, and tossed it into a pail of iced water. Sizzling, steaming, the water boiled instantly.

Walsh dropped heavily into a chair. He could not force himself to move, even to look at the result of his heroic labor. Just to sit there and not move, though he breathed with great effort the blinding, choking ozone, was gratifying.

He clutched his head wearily with his shaking hands. “There’s no use going on,” he thought. “I can’t work fifteen hours a day, doing the work of three men, without breaking down—perhaps losing the whole thing by my idiotic suspicions. I can’t go on! I can’t! I’m killing myself! If I could only trust somebody—”

He fell asleep in the stiff-backed chair and awoke in the morning, stiff in every joint, to find himself lying uncomfortably on the cold floor.

All day he sat, without eating or moving or thinking; just sitting stupidly—numb.

It must have been about six o’clock in the evening, he thought, when he made himself leave his chair and examine the cube of cold metal. There were little spheres of dull metal lying inertly at the bottom of the pail and nothing else in the clear water.

Lloyd Walsh recognized defeat. The breaking point had come at last, he was forced to admit to himself ; still the blow ached in his numb brain.

Defeat—the breaking point—just as success was so near!

He dropped into the chair and covered his face with his tired hands. He might have slept or fainted, it might have been anything, but the next thing he was conscious of was a shy young chap standing nervously before him. Walsh started and hopped to his feet.

“I—I rang the bell,” the other explained hastily. “There was no answer so I tried the door, and it was open, so I walked in.”

“What are you doing here?” Walsh demanded.

The other shifted embarrassedly from one foot to the other. “I came here for a job. I heard you had a lot of machinery here and I’m a mechanic —an electrical mechanic,” he blurted out.

Walsh’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Who told you I had machinery here?”

“I was making the rounds of the buildings,” the young mechanic rushed to explain, more confused than ever. “I was looking for work, and the men downstairs told me they heard your machinery up here. So I came up to see if you had anything for me.”

To Walsh the appearance of the young mechanic seemed providential, but his ever-present suspicions refused to die.

“What’s your name and where did you work before?” he asked.

“Herbert Benton. I—well, I was doing part-time work for the New Jersey Power Co. It was routine work and—well, I suppose I was crazy, but I wanted to do big things, like experimentation and all that sort of thing. So I left and started looking around for other kinds of work—stuff that would give me a chance to use my head instead of taking orders all the time.”

“What kind of work did you want to do?”

Benton leaned forward seriously. “I always wanted to try to make a fuel battery, but I never had the time to work on it. And improve power transmission, like carrying big loads on thinner cables, and making a narrow-beam radio transmitter that would send loads of energy—“

Walsh leaped to his feet and grasped Benton’s arm. “You—you really wanted to do all this?” he gasped, astounded at the magnitude of the work the boy had set himself to attempt.

Benton nodded bashfully.

“Where did you get these ideas?” Walsh insisted. “In school? Have you done any work on them at all?”

FLATTERED by Walsh’s interest, Benton held nothing back.

“I got most of them in school,” he admitted. “It was while we studied electrical transmission that I got my first idea. Of course you know that in a power cable the particles of electricity collide with the molecules of the wire and transfer their positive charge; when the molecules of copper collide with other particles of electricity they lose their positive charges to the electrical molecules.

“Now, if I could direct a tight beam —a narrow radio beam—to a receiving set some distance away, I could ionize the air, which would transfer the particles of electricity from one molecule to another in the same way as a power cable does. In that way I could save the cost of cables.”

Walsh sat silent, digesting the idea. “But there would be a considerable loss of energy by the evaporation of electrons from the ionized beam of air, particularly if the temperature was high.”

“Well, that’s true to a certain extent, but consider this: A high-tension cable will be heated quite a bit by its load and the resistance of the copper,” Benton objected. He seemed to know the subject well. “In that case there is a discharge of negatively charged electrons from the hot wire, and the larger the load the greater the discharge, since a rise in temperature increases the discharge, as you mentioned.

“So the load you can convey is pretty well limited, unless you want to string enormously thick cables around the city, and you know the cost of that. In my narrow beam, you can widen or narrow the beam, and make it a thin or thick cable of ionized air, according to the load you want to take.”

“Right!” Walsh cried, excited with the idea. “And that practically does away with Ohm’s law, you know. The passage of electrons through the ionized air would encounter almost no resistance, so, besides saving the loss of energy through the evaporation of electrons that’d ordinarily take place in a high-tension cable, you’d be relieved of the loss of power due to the resistance of the cable. That should be every bit of twenty-five per cent more energy transmittable.”

Benton sat down on the edge of a chair and squirmed happily on it. He could hardly contain himself. “My mother doesn’t understand my ideas,” he confided, “but she does the best she can to help me, like buying parts of machinery for me. Naturally, the stuff costs more than she can afford, and I can’t do as much work as I want to do. But it’s more than I could do in the power house,” he added impetuously.

“I understand that,” Walsh commented sympathetically. “I went through the same difficulty until I found out how to make—” He broke off suddenly. “You couldn’t do much with the salary you got?”

Benton shook his head. “We needed every penny at home.”

“Listen,” Walsh bent forward eagerly, “I’ll let you help me, but you won’t get much money for it. What I will give you, though, is all the machinery and technical help you need. You can live here with me or stay at home with your mother. Either way is all right with me, but you’ll get home pretty late at night, because I generally drive myself ten to fifteen hours a day, or more.”

“I’ll stay here with you, of course.”

“Good! I’ll show you what to do as soon as you’re ready.”

“Gosh, thanks! I—I don’t know how to thank you.” Benton seemed genuinely moved. “May—may I call up my mother and tell her?”

Walsh silently pointed to his tiny living quarters at the end of the loft. Deliriously happy, Benton dashed off to the telephone.

Walsh stared after him.

He turned back to survey his vast room filled with makeshift machines. Everything would be all right now; he wouldn’t have to kill himself with work.

Benton, however, closed the door slowly, peered through the narrowing crack to make certain Walsh intended staying in the loft. Hastily he picked up the telephone and dialed a number, trembling with nervous excitement.

“Hello, Ness?” he spoke softly and rapidly, his mouth close to the transmitter. “Listen—let me talk, will you? I got in with Walsh all right… . No; he has no suspicions. . . . Will you shut up and let me talk? He made a slip while he was talking to me. He makes the gold. Oh, there’s no doubt about it ; he practically told me himself… . What’s that? Find out as much as I can and hang on until we can blow the place over? Right!”

BENTON made excellent progress during the next week, both in his work and in his relationship with Walsh, who admired intensely his ambition and ability to grasp the routine. No important suggestions came from him, but then Walsh did not expect him to grasp the technical intricacies for a considerable time.

At first Benton was permitted to touch only certain machines and witness the entire process, all but the final step. Not that Walsh did not trust him; it was simply his suspicious nature, always involved where his invention was at stake. In so far as trust entered into it at all, Benton knew more about the process than any man alive, with Walsh’s exception. Still, Walsh wanted more time before allowing him to know the whole secret. He watched the unsuspecting boy with never-failing closeness.

Thus when it came time to open the pressure cask, he sent the boy out on various errands, or asked him to do unnecessary work around the room they lived in; pretexts that would be apparent to all but this unworldly lad, he felt sure. As soon as Benton was out of the room, he switched off the lights, leaving only a small lamp burning near the pressure cask, and screened himself off from the end of the room by the bulky shoulder of the machine.

Now there never was failure; the lump of gray metal Walsh placed in the cask three hours before always became a cube of pure yellow gold. More than that, he found himself able to work the entire morning and most of the afternoon on his important experiment, and save the routine production of gold for expense money until the last three hours of the day, without tiring himself or the boy.

Walsh’s treatment of Benton caused him a twinge of honest conscience. He had promised to permit him to work on his original experiments with the conduction of electricity, but he found he required his assistance too often to give him any time to himself. What was worse, though, was that he paid him very poorly, scarcely compensating Benton for the amount of really hard work he did.

He could not pay Benton much, neither could he give him any time to conduct his experiments in wireless transmission of energy. Then what could he do to repay him? Walsh asked himself. There was only one answer—take him into his confidence. Sooner or later it would have to be so. Actually he could find little reason for his suspicious and undeserved treatment of the boy. Before long he would be unable to handle the work alone. Then there would be no choice.

“Benton!” he called.

The machines were silent. His assistant approached quickly.

“I’m taking you into my confidence, Benton,” Walsh said impetuously. “I suppose you know I’m able to make gold?”

Benton hesitated. Was it better to feign ignorance or tell the truth? “I was wondering what we were doing,” he replied evasively.

Now it was Walsh’s turn to hesitate. Clearly, though, it was too late to back out; the secret, or part of it, was told, and nothing remained but for him to tell the rest. Leaning nervously against the huge rounded shoulder of the compression-superheat machine that concealed in its heart the pressure chamber, he fumbled for words:

“Gold is not everything—” No; that would not do.

“We are working for humanity rather than gain—” Too smug, and it was beating all around the subject, instead. Come to the point.

“Listen, Benton,” Walsh gripped tightly the assistant’s left shoulder, “it’s come to a point where I can’t work on alone, I must have help and help that understands perfectly what I’m doing. I told you I make gold, and it’s true; but what’s more important than that is we’re making gold only for expense money—to make possible the really momentous work we’ve set ourselves to do. We’re not working to make ourselves rich. That wouldn’t satisfy me, and I hope it wouldn’t satisfy you.

“You can’t realize how difficult it is to tell some one else the dreams you’ve cherished secretly for years and years.” Walsh felt slightly dizzy and released Benton’s shoulder and sat down. “Do you know what money is? Oh, you probably know the old economic definition—gold is a medium of exhange. It’s true, of course, but a medium of exchange for what?

“At one time foods just grew, requiring practically no attention from the owner; you had sheep and I had cattle; I was tired of beef, wanted mutton, and you wanted beef, so we exchanged. Then we both wanted vegetables from some one who was fortunate enough to have them growing on his land.

“We dragged our respective live stock to him and bartered. But needs grew; new luxuries developed, like bows and arrows, sharp metal knives, and so on. Obviously we could not drag our live stock from one place to another. Mediums of exchange arose—crude iron bars, copper, wampum, beads of pretty stone, gold and silver.

“For thousands of generations we bought foodstuffs and adornments for the houses we owned, all brought forth in the most leisurely manner. Then a change came—machinery was invented. Needs increased rapidly. I produced only one thing and needed to buy from others who each produced only one thing. And everything represented so much energy—so much energy to grow a field of wheat, so much energy to make clothes, to make this, to make that, and to light and heat the apartment I lived in—some one else’s house—while working for somebody else.

“All these represent energy, and gold buys energy. If I could produce enough gold, we could all live—theoretically—like kings, with sufficient energy at our command to buy all we needed with all the gold we possess. But then the amount of gold would be more than the amount of energy, and gold would be worthless. So we would substitute another precious metal that would be rarer than energy, and we’d be on a different standard and no better off, except for the fact that all savings of gold would be wiped out.

“Now,” he breathed hard, watching intently Benton’s shining eyes, “suppose I was able to liberate enough energy to make it too cheap to buy? Do you know what that would be? The true solution of the economic problem. Liberate enough energy to serve all the people instead of only a few, and you can do anything, make anything, and so cheaply that there’s nothing on earth worthless enough to pay for it in its real value.”

BENTON sat quietly, thoughtfully stroking the shoulder of the machine that dared attempt to solve the problems of the world. “You’d make energy the medium of exchange?” he asked.

“No, no! Wipe out every medium of exchange, do away with gold, with capital, with buying power. I’d make things so cheaply there’d be nothing cheap enough to pay for them; nothing to do but to give them away, and that province would be the government’s.”

“Communism!” Benton blurted out.

“Let it be known as communism, if you want to call it that. Or you can call it a perfect democracy, the only perfect democracy the world has known; each person possessing the right to as much energy as his neighbor, and doing his share to release the requisite amount needed to provide himself with the right to possess energy, instead of working away his life to gain a particle of the amount he should have.”

He stabbed his finger at Benton. “Why did you want to supply a cheaper method of transmitting energy?” he asked. “Did you want to get rich? Yes; partly that, but behind it was the vague desire to aid humanity, and our inventions together—mine to make energy so cheap that there is nothing cheap enough to pay for it, and yours to transmit it almost without loss—would not only revolutionize the world, but would give it the real solution of its problems.

“Imagine this: You want to experiment and, instead, find it necessary to work for a living, which means enough to feed, clothe and shelter yourself. The pleasures of life—the more subtle pleasures, all demanding an expenditure of some sort of energy or other—are not yours; for one thing, you don’t want them particularly; more especially, you can’t afford them. All you want is the chance to experiment, and our system of society, which insists that you do some work you don’t want to do, won’t permit you.

“Then everything is changed; by working perhaps an hour a day, doing some routine work more for the, sake of doing some kind of work than for any special necessity, you can provide yourself with enough energy to allow you to devote your life to any other kind of research work or art.

“Parts of machinery—all you want and need—are yours for the asking, since they are produced so cheaply that the one hour a day you work at your routine job more than covers your demands on the public supply of energy, and twenty-three hours of leisure provide the time you need to devote yourself to your chosen task.

“Unlimited, costless energy supplies all this and more: education and higher education at no cost; culture at your own leisure; entertainment with no limit of energy to check it; a full day, less one hour, to apply to the arts; and the one thing every person seeks—security.

“The old struggle for security may be interesting; some think it is the only thing that makes life worth while; but our regime would be more mature, more full of seeking for the truly important things of life, rather than food, clothing, and shelter, and a comfortable old age with rocker, pipe, or knitting needles.”

Benton walked slowly to the window and stood looking out at the lunch-hour crowds. “You’re right,” he said deeply, thoughtfully; “automobiles, airplanes, steamships, food, clothing, shelter, warmth—all these things are energy—life, itself, is an energy concept, and gold can buy all these things.” He wheeled savagely. “But energy should serve life, instead of life serving energy. Wipe out gold—the symbol of energy—and you wipe out evil.”

“Well,” Walsh returned calmly, “you’re attacking the problem from the wrong end. Supply energy without limitation and gold becomes worthless; useless for implements and no longer attractive as an ornament. There can no longer be stealing, because everything is free, and your neighbor is able to pile up stuff as well as you; besides, there’s no point in cluttering up your house with things for your old age—you can get them at any time you want them.”

BENTON paced up and down, his hands stuffed in his pockets. The idea excited him unbearably. “How can you release so much energy?”

“The truth is,” Walsh admitted, “I can release it, but I can’t seem to harness it yet. Perhaps both of us can work out that problem. But the sun, you know, burns with the equivalent of a hundred million tons of coal a minute and shows no signs of burning itself out. The explanation is this: hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1.008; helium an atomic weight of 4 flat. The theory is that four hydrogen atoms form one helium atom, thus releasing .032 of an atom of energy.

“However, to build up four hydrogen atoms to one helium atom and release the .032 would require an amount of physical pressure, superheat, and electrical pressure of more than half a billion volts, which is much more than I could possibly attain. But suppose I break down one hundred and twenty-five atoms of helium—that should produce a thousand atoms of hydrogen.

“It wouldn’t, though. Eight thousandths part of every hydrogen atom formed would be released as pure energy.

“Here’s how I go about it, and the production of atomic energy is by precisely the same method. I inclose a block of lead in a pressure cask that is able to yield a force of a hundred thousand pounds to the square inch and can be heated simultaneously to three thousand degrees centigrade. Then, from six openings, one on each side of the cube, I bombard the lead with alpha rays, emitted by radium, separated from the beta and gamma rays and concentrated and focused—that’s the thing that’s held up the release of atomic energy until now. That’s half the secret.

“Now, alpha rays are positively charged helium atoms and travel at a rate of 10,000 miles per second. When they collide with another atom, negatively charged, there is a tremendous transmission of energy. The alpha rays smash into the lead. They knock off electrons and protons from the lead atoms until the atomic weight is down to that of gold.”

Benton whistled in awe. “How can you figure that out?”

“Well,” Lloyd Walsh waved toward a clock set in the machine, “that’s about the only way I have. You see,” he bent forward eagerly, “this is more or less of a hit-or-miss proposition. Electrons—even atoms—are submicroscopically small things, you know, and to hit them is a matter requiring extreme patience, but if you bombard lead long enough—about three hours generally, if the charge of alpha rays is large enough and concentrated and covers all parts of the lead—you can be fairly certain you’ll hit most of them, and those you don’t hit will be hit by other electrons smashed and recoiled out of their orbits.

“The atomic weight of lead is 207.2 and that of gold is 197.2. Knock ten electrons out of their orbits and you have gold—”

“But how do you get the pressure and heat,” Benton interrupted, “and why do you require to have them?”

Walsh strode around the machine, followed by his assistant. “I have the inside of the machine filled with water, surrounding the pressure chamber. Pressure applied to an inclosed fluid is transmitted equally, without diminution, to all parts of the fluid. If I can have springs and straight-arm joints, a thousand of them, all yielding a pressure of a hundred pounds to the square inch, I get my hundred thousand pounds to the square inch. Take a look at the machine.”

Benton examined it closely. It was a great sphere suspended three feet above the floor, surrounded by a bewildering maze of short, thick springs and straight-arm joints that could be straightened very slowly, and each anchored to a massive bulwark, something like the cushion at the end of a subway track.

Walsh stood in the narrow aisle leading to the door of the pressure chamber between the first rows of springs and forced down a lever. With a startlingly quick motion and a scream of tortured steel, the springs darted forward and half disappeared into the body of the machine.

“That gives a pressure of fifty thousand pounds to the square inch immediately,” Walsh bellowed above the roar of the motors and dynamos. “If I straightened the other joints at once, the machine would be torn to pieces under the strain. But slowly, over a period of half an hour, I increase the pressure by straightening the joints little by little.

“Inside the cask is an electric furnace, lining the chamber. It’s no difficult feat to get three thousand degrees centigrade —any dental mechanic can do it with his furnace.

“The combination of superheat and vast pressure condenses the metal so, the atoms are forced more than four thousand times more closely together than normally. This reduces the difficulty in smashing the electrons out of their orbits.”

“And the energy liberated?” Benton rasped harshly.

“A glass of water would carry a steamship across the Atlantic.”

BENTON found a pretext for rushing out of the loft. His conscience, which was always strong but had been until this time lulled by necessity, was giving him trouble now. At the corner drug, store he frantically dialed Ness’ phone number; there was no answer.

In a taxi he careened madly to the store. It was locked. He was frenzied, realizing Ness, Harding, and Caine had lost patience with him and had determined to take matters into their own hands, regardless of the progress he had made in discovering Walsh’s secret.

The future—“progress of humanity” —“gold in itself is worthless, only as a medium of exchange for energy—”

And they could produce energy so cheaply there was nothing worthless enough to pay for it!

IT WAS NINE o’clock in the morning. He—it could have been Benton—had eaten an automatically prepared and served breakfast, and now he left the alabaster-white community house, one of many beautiful dwellings that rose in loveliness toward the sky. Intoxication was in the air; perhaps it was simply spring; more particularly it was an undeniable sensation that life was worth living.

It was worth while. Consider this, he said to himself—in half an hour he was to begin the one short hour of routine work that constituted his entire working day, and he had given himself twenty more minutes than necessary. He could stand idly on the moving streets, breathing meanwhile the fragrant perfume of the spring air, unspoiled by various fumes.

There were clean streets and filtered air; no sense of flutter and bustle; though occasionally a plane darted hurriedly across the sky; others ambled in a leisurely manner to their destinations. Certainly everything must be done, but leisure was too precious a thing to destroy in mad pursuit of vain enjoyment. Buildings harmonized in shape and color with their neighbors; from earth they were lovely enough to look upon; from the sky their exquisite color patterns were unspeakably lovely.

There were ornate palaces of intricate pleasures, and there were simple athletic games for exercise alone; speed was not encouraged, but sometimes one craved for adventure and a strong thrill to wash ennui from the veins. Palaces of pleasure and knowledge, these went together well, for one without the other would be futile or intolerable.

Everything for human comfort and enjoyment was free for asking—food, clothing, shelter, warmth, knowledge, culture, leisure, pleasure, speed.

And above all the buildings arched the energy beams invented in the twentieth century by Herbert Benton.

Best of all was the feeling of security and independence, of coming and going as he pleased, after performing his trifling task of one hour a day. To that extent he was obligated to society, but no more than society was obligated to him.

Now he was leaving the suburbs and entering the city. True, the buildings were not as daintily lovely as the residences, yet in a powerful way they demonstrated their strength to provide for civilization.

He neared a machine shop and edged to the slower ways to get off and order parts sent to his private laboratory. As he stood and fondled the perfectly cut parts, he knew happiness. There was no loneliness, for his friends numbered hundreds; no boredom, though occasionally he was tired after successfully completing an experiment, for his mind had to be cultivated and knowledge sought, and there were numerous ways of relieving physical exhaustion. And he could work or play as he wished, with no one to demand that he earn bread by sweating twelve hours.

These things, and more, might have been—

THROUGH the window as the cab careened insanely around the corner, Benton glimpsed Ness, Harding, and Caine striding purposefully into the building. They looked menacing. Benton quivered with rage and anxiety.

A moment was wasted in paying the driver and another in waiting for an elevator. Then the three were upstairs. Something was bound to happen when they clashed with Walsh. Benton dashed wildly through the corridor around to the back entrance. Perhaps there was still time

He opened the door of the loft slowly and crawled out on hands and knees. The shoulder of the machine, he knew, would hide him from view.

“Benton double-crossed us!” he heard Ness grate harshly. “Well, we got guns, and we won’t mind using them on you if you don’t come across and tell us how you make gold.”

Benton peered around the machine. The three stood threateningly, revolvers held expertly before them, pointing at Walsh, who stood calmly—silently—Benton ignored them, though his hands shook with impatience and nervousness. He heaved at a cameralike attachment mounted on a crane that was forced into an opening near the pressure chamber. It swung back slowly. He straightened it up above the shoulder.

“Stand back, Walsh!” he cried. Walsh leaped to one side.

“So you double-crossed us, eh?” Harding roared.

“What the hell is that?” Caine demanded, smiling at the thing pointed at them. It resembled a floodlight.

“Concentrated alpha rays. Throw down your guns, or I’ll blow you all over the city.”

For answer, the three sneered, aimed their guns at the machines and stepped forward.

“Turn it on!” Walsh bellowed. Without becoming too involved, this is what happened:

For the first time in history, alpha rays, concentrated and amplified, collided with the free and combined hydrogen atoms in a human body. More than half the body is composed of water; the hydrogen atoms were knocked out of combination with oxygen atoms, and at first they appeared like dried, withered apples, for a brief second. Then an explosion that rocked the building blew them into fragments. Ergs liberated: 2,000,000 at the very least.

Do you remember WARRIORS OF ETERNITY? It was a great

story—and one that demanded a sequel. And now Carl Buchanan

and Dr. Arch Carr have written that sequel. They call it

THE DISCUS-MEN OF EKTA—and it’s coming soon!

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