re, Greg," he said. "Something's wrong."

Greg Manning turned away from the calculator where he had been working
and stared at the screen.

"How long has it been acting that way?" he asked.

"Just started," said Russ.

Greg straightened and glanced down the row of television machines. Some
of them were dead, their switches closed, but on the screens of many of
the others was the same effect as on this machine. Their operators were
working frustratedly at the controls, trying to focus the image, bring
it into sharp relief.

"Can't seem to get a thing, sir," said one of the men. "I was working on
the fueling station out on Io, and the screen just went haywire."

"Mine seems to be all right," said another man. "I've had it on Sandebar
for the last couple of hours and there's nothing wrong."

A swift check revealed one fact. The machines, when trained on the
Jovian worlds, refused to function. Anywhere else in space, however,
they worked perfectly.

Russ stoked and lit his pipe, snapped off his machine and swung around
in the operator's chair.

"Somebody's playing hell with us out around Jupiter," he stated calmly.

"I've been expecting something like this," said Greg. "I have been
afraid of this ever since Craven blanketed us out of the Interplanetary
building."

* * * * *

"He really must have something this time," Russ agreed. "He's blanketing
out the entire Jovian system. There's a space field of low intensity
surrounding all of Jupiter, enclosing all the moons. He keeps shifting
the intensity so that, even though we can force our way through his
field, the irregular variations make it impossible to line up anything.
It works, in principle, just as effectively as if we couldn't get
through at all."

Greg whistled soundlessly through suddenly bared teeth.

"That takes power," he said, "and I'm afraid Craven has it. Power to
burn."

"The collector field?" asked Russ.

Greg nodded. "A field that sucks in radiant energy. Free energy that he
just reaches out and grabs. And it doesn't depend on the Sun alone. It
probably makes use of every type of radiation in all of space."

Russ slumped in his chair, smoking, his forehead wrinkled in thought.

"If that's what he's got," he finally declared, "he's going to be hard
to crack. He can suck in any radiant vibration form, any space
vibration. He can shift them around, break them down and build them up.
He can discharge them, di