ght.

He had cut the wire with a pair of shears and it had still hung,
unsupported, in the air, unchanging within the shimmer that constituted
something no man had ever seen before.

"You can't put energy in," said Page, talking to himself, chewing the
bit of his pipe. "You can't take energy out. It's still as hot as it
was at the moment the change came. But it can't radiate any of that
heat. It can't radiate any kind of energy."

Why, even the wire was reflective, so that it couldn't absorb energy and
thus disturb the balance that existed within that bit of space. Not only
energy itself was preserved, but the very form of energy.

But why? That was the question that hammered at him. Why? Before he
could go ahead, he had to know why.

Perhaps the verging of the field toward Field 349? Somewhere in between
those two fields of force, somewhere within that almost non-existent
borderline which separated them, he might find the secret.

Rising to his feet, he knocked out his pipe.

"Harry," he announced, "we have work to do."

Smoke drooled from Wilson's nostrils.

"Yeah," he said.

Page had a sudden urge to lash out and hit the man. That eternal
drooling of smoke out of his nostrils, that everlasting cigarette
dangling limply from one corner of his mouth, the shifty eyes, the dirty
fingernails, got on his nerves.

But Wilson was a mechanical genius. His hands were clever despite the
dirty nails. They could fashion pinhead cameras and three-gram
electroscopes or balances capable of measuring the pressure of
electronic impacts. As a laboratory assistant he was unbeatable. If only
he wouldn't answer every statement or question with that nerve-racking
'yeah'!

Page stopped in front of a smaller room, enclosed by heavy quartz.
Inside that room was the great bank of mercury-vapor rectifiers. From
them lashed a blue-green glare that splashed against his face and
shoulders, painting him in angry, garish color. The glass guarded him
from the terrific blast of ultra-violet light that flared from the pool
of shimmering molten metal, a terrible emanation that would have flayed
a man's skin from his body within the space of seconds.

* * * * *

The scientist squinted his eyes against the glare. There was something
in it that caught him with a deadly fascination. The personification of
power--the incredibly intense spot of incandescent vapor, the tiny
sphere of blue-green fire, the spinnin