g surge of that shining pool, the
intense glare of ionization.

Power ... the breath of modern mankind, the pulse of progress.

In an adjacent room were the accumulators. Not Interplanetary
accumulators, which he would have had to rent, but ones he had bought
from a small manufacturer who turned out only ten or fifteen thousand a
year ... not enough to bother Interplanetary.

Gregory Manning had made it possible for him to buy those accumulators.
Manning had made many things possible in this little laboratory hidden
deep within the heart of the Sierras, many miles from any other
habitation.

Manning's grandfather, Jackson Manning, had first generated the
curvature field and overcome gravity, had left his grandson a fortune
that approached the five-billion mark. But that had not been all. From
his famous ancestor, Manning had inherited a keen, sharp, scientific
mind. From his mother's father, Anthony Barret, he had gained an astute
business sense. But unlike his maternal grandfather, he had not turned
his attention entirely to business. Old Man Barret had virtually ruled
Wall Street for almost a generation, had become a financial myth linked
with keen business sense, with an uncanny ability to handle men and
money. But his grandson, Gregory Manning, had become known to the world
in a different way. For while he had inherited scientific ability from
one side of the family, financial sense from the other, he likewise had
inherited from some other ancestor--perhaps remote and unknown--a
wanderlust that had taken him to the farthest outposts of the Solar
System.

* * * * *

It was Gregory Manning who had financed and headed the rescue expedition
which took the first Pluto flight off that dark icebox of a world when
the exploration ship had crashed. It was he who had piloted home the
winning ship in the Jupiter derby, sending his bulleting craft screaming
around the mighty planet in a time which set a Solar record. It was
Gregory Manning who had entered the Venusian swamps and brought back,
alive, the mystery lizard that had been reported there. And he was the
one who had flown the serum to Mercury when the lives of ten thousand
men depended upon the thrumming engines that drove the shining ship
inward toward the Sun.

Russell Page had known him since college days. They had worked out their
experiments together in the school laboratories, had spent long hours
arguing and wondering ... d