ish now, the typical color of
ionized air. They were just power beams, meeting at a common center, but
somehow they were queer, too, for though they were capable of slashing
far out into space, they were stopped dead. Their might was pouring into
a common center and going no farther. A splash of intensely glowing
light rested over them, then began to rotate slowly as a motor somewhere
hummed softly, cutting through the mad roar and rumble of power that
surged through the laboratory.

The glowing light was spinning more swiftly now. A rotating field was
being established. The power beams began to wink, falling and rising in
intensity. The sphere seemed to grow, almost filling the space between
the copper blocks. It touched one and rebounded slightly toward another.
It extended, increased slightly. A terrible screaming ripped through the
room, drowning out the titanic din as the spinning sphere came in
contact with the copper blocks, as force and metal resulted in weird
friction.

With a shocking wrench the beams went dead, the scream cut off, the roar
was gone. A terrifying silence fell upon the room as soon as the
suddenly thunking relays opened automatically.

* * * * *

The sphere was gone! In its place was a tenuous refraction that told
where it had been. That and a thin layer of perfectly reflective
copper ... colorless now, but Manning knew it was copper, for it
represented the continuation of the great copper blocks.

His mind felt as if it were racing in neutral, getting nowhere. Within
that sphere was the total energy that had been poured out by five
gigantic beams, turned on full, for almost a minute's time. Compressed
energy! Energy enough to blast these mountains down to the primal rock
were it released instantly. Energy trapped and held by virtue of some
peculiarity of that little borderline between Force Fields 348 and 349.

Russ walked across the room to a small electric truck with rubber
caterpillar treads, driven by a bank of portable accumulators.
Skillfully the scientist maneuvered it over to the other side of the
room, picked up a steel bar four inches in diameter and five feet long.
Holding it by the handler's magnetic crane, he fixed it firmly in the
armlike jaws on the front of the machine, then moved the machine into a
position straddling the sphere of force.

With smashing momentum the iron jaws thrust downward, driving the steel
bar into the sphere. There w