"You mean to say that we aren't prisoners?"

Greg shook his head. "Not prisoners," he said. "Why, I came out here to
guide you back to Earth. I hauled you out here and got you into this
jam. It was up to me to get you out of it. I would have done the same
for Stutsman, too, but ..."

He hesitated and looked at Chambers.

Chambers stared back and slowly nodded.

"Yes, Manning," he said. "I think I understand."

_CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE_

Chambers lit his cigar and leaned back in his chair.

"I wish you could see it my way, Manning," he said. "There's no place
for me on Earth, no place for me in the Solar System. You see, I tried
and failed. I'm just a has-been back there."

He laughed quietly. "Somehow, I can't imagine myself coming back in the
role of the defeated tribal leader, chained to your chariot, so to
speak."

"But it wouldn't be that way," protested Greg. "Your company is gone,
true, and your stocks are worthless, but you haven't lost everything.
You still have a fleet of ships. With our new power, the Solar System
will especially need ships. Lots of ships. For the spacelanes will be
filled with commerce. You'd be coming back to a new deal, a new Solar
System, a place that has been transformed almost overnight by power
that's practically free."

"Yes, yes, I know all that," said Chambers. "But I climbed too high. I
got too big. I can't come back now as something small, a failure."

"You have things we need," said Greg. "The screen that blankets out our
television and tele-transport, for example. We need your screen as a
safeguard against the very thing we have created. Think of what criminal
uses could be made of the tele-transport. No vault, no net of charged
wires, nothing, could stop a thief from taking anything he wanted.
Prisons would cease to be prisons. Criminals could reach in and pick up
their friends, no matter how many guards there were. Prisons and bank
vaults and national treasuries could be cleaned out in a single day."

"Then there's the super-saturated space fields," added Russ, ruefully.
"Those almost got us. If I hadn't thought of moving the televisor
through time, we would have had to pull stakes and run for it."

"No, you wouldn't," pointed out Craven. "You could have wiped us out in
a moment. You can disintegrate matter. Send it up in a puff of smoke ...
rip every electron apart and send it hurtling away."

"Of course we could have, Craven," said Greg, "but we wouldn't