y on Spencer Chambers for your power. Callisto is yours. Ranthoor is
yours."

The black crowd surged forward, reached the steps and started to climb,
wild cheers in their throat, the madness of victory in their eyes. Up
the steps came men with nothing but bare hands, screaming women, jeering
children.

Officers snapped orders at the troops that lined the steps, but the
troopers, staring into the awful, raging maw of that oncoming crowd,
dropped their guns and fled, back into the capitol building, with the
mob behind them, shrilling blood lust and long-awaited vengeance.

* * * * *

Out of the red and yellow wilderness of the deserts, a man came to
Sandebar on Mars. He had long been thought dead. The minions of the
government had announced that he was dead. But he had been in hiding for
six years.

His beard was long and gray, his eyes were curtained by hardship, his
white hair hung about his shoulders and he was clothed in the tattered
leather trappings of the spaceways.

But men remembered him.

Tom Brown had lead the last revolt against the Martian government, an
ill-starred revolt that ended almost before it started when the
troopers turned loose the heavy heaters and swept the streets with
washing waves of flame.

When he climbed to the base of a statue in Techor Park to address the
crowd that gathered, the police shouted for him to come down and he
disregarded them. They climbed the statue to reach him and their hands
went through him.

Tom Brown stood before the people, in plain view, and spoke, but he
wasn't there!

Other things happened in Sandebar that day. A voice spoke out of thin
air, a voice that told the people the reign of Interplanetary was over.
It told of a mighty new source of power. Power that would cost almost
nothing. Power that would make the accumulators unnecessary ... would
make them out of date. A voice that said the people need no longer
submit to the yoke of Spencer Chambers' government in order to obtain
the power they needed.

There was no one there ... no one visible at all. And yet that voice
went on and on. A great crowd gathered, listening, cheering. The police
tried to break it up and failed. The troops were ordered out and the
people fought them until the voice told them to disband peaceably and go
to their homes.

Throughout Mars it was the same.

In a dozen places in Sandebar the voice spoke. It spoke in a dozen
places, out of empty