their master. On Earth the agents and the lobbyists
representing Interplanetary swarmed in every capital, even in the
capital of the Central European Federation, whose people were dominated
by an absolute dictatorship. For even Central Europe needed
accumulators.

"Economic dictatorship," said Spencer Chambers to himself. "That's what
John Moore Mallory called it." Well, why not? Such a dictatorship would
insure the best business brains at the heads of the governments, would
give the Solar System a business administration, would guard against the
mistakes of popular government.

Democracies were based on a false presumption--the theory that all
people were fit to rule. It granted intelligence where there was no
intelligence. It presumed ability where there was not the 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.