17 - Empire by Clifford D. Simak

“It was a weird revolution. There were few battles, little blood shed. There seemed to be no secret plots. There were no skulking leaders, no passwords, nothing that in former years had marked rebellion against tyranny. It was a revolution carried out with utter boldness. Secret police were helpless, for it was not a secret revolution.”

“Government propagandists spread the word that the material-energy engines were not safe. Reports were broadcast that on at least two occasions the engines had blown up, killing the men who operated them. But this propaganda failed to gain credence, for in the cities that were in the rebel hands, technicians were at work manufacturing and setting up the material engines. Demonstrations were given. The people saw them, saw what enormous power they developed.”

“He really must have something this time, Ross 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.”

“The mechanical shadow, the little machine that always tells us where Craven is, as long as he's wearing his glasses. He always wears them, said Russ crisply. He's as blind as a bat without them. Greg set the machine down on the table. When we find Craven, we'll find the contraption that's blanketing Jupiter and its moons.”

“He's carrying photocells and several thousand tons of accumulator stacks. Not much power left in them. He could pour a billion horsepower into them for hours and still have room for more. Greg nodded wearily. All we've been doing is feeding him.”

“Craven, said Greg Grimley, he let us have everything he had. He simply drained his accumulator stacks and threw it all into our face. But he's done now. That was his only shot. He'll have to build up power now, and that will take a while. But we couldn't have taken much more.”

“And yet the ten engines bellowed like things insane, as Craven struck with flaming bolts, utilising the power he had absorbed from the fifty billion horsepower Greg had thrown at him. The first screen stopped all material things, the second stopped radiations by refracting them into the fourth dimension, the third shield was akin to the anti-entropy field, which stopped all matter.”