EMPIRE Read Online Free PDF

the machine were blurring. Russ, at the controls, seemed horribly disjointed. Manning was a caricature of a man, a weird, strange figure that moved and gestured in the mad room.
    Wilson fought against the dizziness. He tried to take a step and the floor seemed to leap up and meet his outstretched foot, throwing him off balance. His cigarette fell out of his mouth, rolled along the floor.
    Russ was shouting something, but the words were distorted, loud one instant, rising over the din of the apparatus, a mere whisper the next. They made no sense.
    There was a peculiar whistling in the air, a sound such as he had never heard before. It seemed to come from far away, a high, thin shriek that was torture in one’s ears.
    Giddy, seized with deathly nausea, Wilson clawed his way across the floor, swung open the laboratory door and stumbled outdoors. He weaved across the lawn and clung to a sun dial, panting.
    He looked back at the laboratory and gasped in disbelief. All the trees were bent toward the building, as if held by some mighty wind. Their branches straining, every single leaf standing at rigid attention, the trees were bending in toward the structure. But there was no wind.
    And then he noticed something else. No matter where the trees stood, no matter in what direction from the laboratory, they all bent inward toward the building . . . and the whining, thundering, shrieking machine.
    Inside the laboratory an empty bottle crashed off a table and smashed into a thousand fragments. The tinkling of the broken glass was a silvery, momentary sound that protested against the blasting thrum of power that shook the walls.
    Manning fought along the floor to Russ’s side. Russ roared in his ear: “Gravitational control! Concentration of gravitational lines!”
    The papers on the desk started to slide, slithering onto the floor, danced a crazy dervish across the room. Liquids in the laboratory bottles were climbing the sides of glass, instead of lying at rest parallel with the floor. A chair skated, bucking and tipping crazily, toward the door.
    * * * *
    Russ jerked the power lever back to zero. The power hum died. The liquids slid back to their natural level, the chair tipped over and lay still, papers fluttered gently downward.
    The two men looked at one another across the few feet of floor space between them. Russ wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead with his shirt sleeve. He sucked on his pipe, but it was dead.
    “Greg,” Russ said jubilantly, “we have something better than anti-gravity! We have something you might call positive gravity . . . gravity that we can control. Your grandfather nullified gravity. We’ve gone him one better.”
    Greg gestured toward the machine. “You created an attraction center. What else?”
    “But the center itself is not actually an attracting force. The fourth dimension is mixed up in this. We have a sort of fourth-dimensional lens that concentrates the lines of any gravitational force. Concentration in the fourth dimension turns the force loose in three dimensions, but we can take care of that by using mirrors of our anti-entropy. We can arrange it so that it turns the force loose in only one dimension.”
    Greg was thoughtful for a moment. “We can guide a ship by a series of lenses,” he declared at last. “But here’s the really important thing. That field concentrates the forces of gravity already present. Those forces exist throughout all of space. There are gravitational lines everywhere. We can concentrate them in any direction we want to. In reality, we fall toward the body which originally caused the force of gravitation, not to the concentration.”
    Russ nodded. “That means we can create a field immediately ahead of the ship. The ship would fall into it constantly, with the concentration moving on ahead. The field would tend to break down in proportion to the strain imposed and a big ship, especially when you are building up speed, would tend to enlarge it,