as a groaning crash as the handler came to a
halt, shuddering, with only eight inches of the bar buried in the
sphere. The stench of hot insulation filled the room while the electric
motor throbbed, the rubber treads creaked, the machine groaned and
strained, but the bar would go no farther.

Russ shut off the machine and stood back.

"That gives you an idea," he said grimly.

"The trick now," Greg said, "is to break down the field."

Without a word, Russ reached for the power controls. A sudden roar of
thunderous fury and the beams leaped at the sphere ... but this time the
sphere did not materialize again. Again the wrench shuddered through the
laboratory, a wrench that seemed to distort space and time.

Then, as abruptly as it had come, it was gone. But when it ended,
something gigantic and incomprehensibly powerful seemed to rush
soundlessly by ... something that was felt and sensed. It was like a
great noiseless, breathless wind in the dead of night that rushed by
them and through them, all about them in space and died slowly away.

But the vanished steel did not reappear with the disappearance of the
sphere and the draining away of power. Almost grotesquely now, the
handler stood poised above the place where the sphere had been and in
its jaws it held the bar. But the end of the bar, the eight inches that
had been within the sphere, was gone. It had been sliced off so sharply
that it left a highly reflective concave mirror on the severed surface.

"Where is it?" demanded Manning. "In that higher dimension?"

Russ shook his head. "You noticed that rushing sensation? That may have
been the energy of matter rushing into some other space. It may be the
key to the energy of matter!"

Gregory Manning stared at the bar. "I'm staying with you, Russ. I'm
seeing this thing through."

"I knew you would," said Russ.

Triumph flamed briefly in Manning's eyes. "And when we finish, we'll
have something that will break Interplanetary. We'll smash their
stranglehold on the Solar System." He stopped and looked at Page. "Lord,
Russ," he whispered, "do you realize what we'll have?"

"I think I do, Greg," the scientist answered soberly. "Material energy
engines. Power so cheap that you won't be able to give it away. More
power than anybody could ever need."

_CHAPTER THREE_

Russ hunched over the keyboard set in the control room of the _Comet_
and stared down at the keys. The equation was set and ready. All he