sterious drinks concocted of
ingredients harvested in the jungles of Venus, spiced with produce from
the irrigated gardens of Mars.

He puffed on the dangling cigarette and shuffled on along the airy
highwalk. Below and above him, all around him flowed the beauty and the
glamor, the bravery and the splendor of New York. The city's song was in
his ears, the surging noises that were its voice.

Two thousand feet above his head reared giant pinnacles of shining
metal, glinting in the noonday sun, architecture that bore the alien
stamp of other worlds.

Wilson turned around, stared at the Martian Club. A man needed money to
pass through those doors, to taste the drinks that slid across its bar,
to sit and watch its floor shows, to hear the music of its orchestras.

For a moment he stood, hesitating, as if he were trying to make up his
mind. He flipped away the cigarette, turned on his heel, walked briskly
to the automatic elevator which would take him to the lower levels.

There, on the third level, he entered a Mecho restaurant, sat down at a
table and ordered from the robot waiter, pushing ivory-tipped buttons on
the menu before him.

He ate leisurely, smoked ferociously, thinking. Looking at his watch, he
saw that it was nearly two o'clock. He walked to the cashier machine,
inserted the metallic check with the correct change and received from
the clicking, chuckling register the disk that would let him out the
door.

"Thank you, come again," the cashier-robot fluted.

"Don't mention it," growled Wilson.

Outside the restaurant he walked briskly. Ten blocks away he came to a
building roofing four square blocks. Over the massive doorway, set into
the beryllium steel, was a map of the Solar System, a map that served as
a cosmic clock, tracing the movement of the planets as they swung in
their long arcs around the Sun. The Solar System was straddled by
glowing, golden letters. They read: INTERPLANETARY BUILDING.

It was from here that Spencer Chambers ruled his empire built on power.

Wilson went inside.

_CHAPTER FOUR_

The new apparatus was set up, a machine that almost filled the
laboratory ... a giant, compact mass of heavy, solidly built metal work,
tied together by beams of girderlike construction. It was meant to stand
up under the hammering of unimaginable power, the stress of unknown
spatial factors.

Slowly, carefully, Russell Page tapped keys on the control board,
setting up an equation.