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  Eagerly, he was handing a ball and cue to the professor. Priss, his eyes hidden by the goggles, stared at them and only very slowly, very uncertainly, reached out to take them.

  I wonder what his eyes were showing. I wonder, too, how much of the decision to have Priss play billiards at the demonstration was due to Bloom’s anger at Priss’s remark about their periodic game, the remark I had quoted. Had I been, in my way, responsible for what followed?

  “Come, stand up, Professor,” said Bloom, “and let me have your seat. The show is yours from now on. Go ahead!”

  Bloom seated himself and still talked, in a voice that grew more organlike with each moment. “Once Professor Priss sends the ball into the volume of zero-gravity, it will no longer be affected by Earth’s gravitational field. It will remain truly motionless while the Earth rotates about its axis and travels about the sun. In this latitude, and at this time of day, I have calculated that the Earth, in its motions, will sink downward. We will move with it, and the ball will stand still. To us it will seem to rise up and away from the Earth’s surface. Watch.”

  Priss seemed to stand in front of the table in frozen paralysis. Was it surprise? Astonishment? I don’t know. I’ll never know. Did he make a move to interrupt Bloom’s little speech, or was he just suffering from an agonized reluctance to play the ignominious part into which he was being forced by his adversary?

  Priss turned to the billiard table, looking first at it, then back at Bloom. Every reporter was on his feet, crowding as closely as possible in order to get a good view. Only Bloom himself remained seated, smiling and isolated. (He, of course, was not watching the table, or the balls, or the zero-gravity field. As nearly as I could tell through the goggles, he was watching Priss.)

  Priss turned to the table and placed his ball. He was going to be the agent that was to bring final and dramatic triumph to Bloom and make himself—the man who said it couldn’t be done—the goat to be mocked forever.

  Perhaps he felt there was no way out. Or perhaps—

  With a sure stroke of his cue, he set the ball into motion. It was not going quickly, and every eye followed it. It struck the side of the table and caromed. It was going even slower now as though Priss himself were increasing the suspense and making Bloom’s triumph the more dramatic.

  I had a perfect view, for I was standing on the side of the table opposite from that where Priss was. I could see the ball moving toward the glitter of the zero-gravity field, and beyond it I could see those portions of the seated Bloom which were not hidden by that glitter.

  The ball approached the zero-gravity volume, seemed to hang on the edge for a moment and then was gone, with a streak of light, the sound of a thunder-clap and the sudden smell of burning cloth.

  We yelled. We all yelled.

  I’ve seen the scene on television since—along with the rest of the world. I can see myself in the film during that fifteen second period of wild confusion, but I don’t really recognize my face.

  Fifteen seconds!

  And then we discovered Bloom. He was still sitting in the chair, his arms still folded—but there was a hole the size of a billiard ball through left wrist, chest and back. The better part of his heart, as it later turned out under autopsy, had been neatly punched out.

  They turned off the device. They called in the police. They dragged off Priss, who was in a state of utter collapse. I wasn’t much better off, to tell the truth, and if any reporter then on the scene ever tried to say he remained a cool observer of that scene, then he’s a cool liar.

  V

  It was some months before I got to see Priss again. He had lost some weight but seemed well otherwise, indeed, there was color in his cheeks and an air of decision about him. He was better dressed than I had ever seen him to be.

  He said, “I know what happened now. If I had had time to think, I would have known then. But I am a slow thinker, and poor Ed Bloom was so intent on running a great show and doing it so well that he carried me along with him. Naturally, I’ve been trying to make up for some of the damage I unwittingly caused.”

  “You can’t bring Bloom back to life,” I said, soberly. “No, I can’t,” he said, just as soberly. “But there’s Bloom Enterprises to think of, too. What happened at the demonstration, in full view of the world, was the worst possible advertisement for zero-gravity, and it’s important that the story be made clear. That is why I have asked to see you.”

  “Yes?”

  “If I had been a quicker thinker, I would have known Ed was speaking the purest nonsense, when he said that the billiard ball would slowly rise in the zero-gravity field. It couldn’t be so! If Bloom hadn’t despised theory so, if he hadn’t been so intent on being proud of his own ignorance of theory, he’d have known it himself.

  “The Earth’s motion, after all, isn’t the only motion involved, young man. The sun itself moves in a vast orbit about the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And the galaxy moves, too, in some not very clearly defined way. If the billiard ball were subjected to zero gravity, you might think of it as being unaffected by any of these motions and therefore of suddenly falling into a state of absolute rest—when there is no such thing as absolute rest.”

  Priss shook his head slowly. “The trouble with Ed, I think, was that he was thinking of the kind of zero gravity one gets in a spaceship in free fall, when people float in mid-air. He expected the ball to float in mid-air. However, in a spaceship, zero gravity is not the result of an absence of gravitation, but merely the result of two objects, a ship and a man within the ship, falling at the same rate, responding to gravity in precisely the same way, so that each is motionless with respect to the other.

  “In the zero-gravity field produced by Ed, there was a flattening of the rubber-sheet universe, which means an actual loss of mass. Everything in that field, including molecules of air caught within it, and the billiard ball I pushed into it, was completely massless as long as it remained with it A completely massless object can move in only one way.”

  He paused, inviting the question. I asked, “What motion would that be?”

  “Motion at the speed of light Any massless object, such as a neutrino or a photon, must travel at the speed of light as long as it exists. In fact, light moves at that speed only because it is made up of photons. As soon as the billiard ball entered the zero-gravity field and lost its mass, it, too, assumed the speed of light at once and left”

  I shook my head. “But didn’t it regain its mass as soon as it left the zero-gravity volume?”

  “It certainly did, and at once it began to be affected by the gravitational field and to slow up in response to the friction of the air and the top of the billiard table. But imagine how much friction it would take to slow up an object the mass of a billiard ball going at the speed of light. It went through the hundred-mile thickness of our atmosphere in a thousandth of a second, and I doubt that it was slowed more than a few miles a second in doing so; a few miles out of 186,282 of them. On the way, it scorched the top of the billiard table, broke cleanly through the edge, went through poor Ed and the window too, punching out neat circles, because it had passed through before the neighboring portions of something even as brittle as glass had a chance to split and splinter.

  “It is extremely fortunate we were on the top floor of a building set in a countrified area. If we were in the city, it might have passed through a number of buildings and killed a number of people. By now that billiard ball is off in space, far beyond the edge of the solar system, and it will continue to travel so forever, at nearly the speed of light, until it happens to strike an object large enough to stop it. And it will then gouge out a sizable crater.”

  I played with the notion and was not sure I liked it. “How is that possible? The billiard ball entered the zero-gravity volume almost at a standstill. I saw it. And you say it left with an incredible quantity of kinetic energy. Where did the energy come from?”

  Priss shrugged. “It came from nowhere! The law of conservation o
f energy only holds under the conditions in which general relativity is valid; that is, in an indented rubber-sheet universe. Wherever the indentation is flattened out, general relativity no longer holds, and energy can be created and destroyed freely. That accounts for the radiation along the cylindrical surface of the zero-gravity volume. That radiation, you remember, Bloom did not explain, and, I fear, could not explain. If he had only experimented further first; if he had only not been so foolishly anxious to put on his show—”

  “What accounts for the radiation, sir?”

  “The molecules of air inside the volume! Each assumes the speed of light and comes smashing outward. They’re only molecules, not billiard balls, so they’re stopped, but the kinetic energy of their motion is converted into energetic radiation. It’s continuous because new molecules are always drifting in and attaining the speed of light and smashing out.”

  “Then energy is being created continuously?”

  “Exactly. And that is what we must make clear to the public. Anti-gravity is not primarily a device to lift spaceships or to revolutionize mechanical movement. Rather it is the source of an endless supply of free energy, since part of the energy produced can be diverted to maintain the field that keeps that portion of the universe flat. What Ed Bloom invented, without knowing it, was not just anti-gravity, but the first successful perpetual motion machine of the first class—one that manufactures energy out of nothing.”

  I said, slowly, “Any one of us could have been killed by that billiard ball, is that right, Professor? It might have come out in any direction.”

  Priss said, “Well, massless photons emerge from any light source at the speed of light in any direction; that’s why a candle casts light in all directions. The massless air molecules come out of the zero-gravity volume in all directions, which is why the entire cylinder radiates. But the billiard ball was only one object. It could have come out in any direction, but it had to come out in some one direction, chosen at random, and the chosen direction happened to be the one that caught Ed.”

  That was it. Everyone knows the consequences. Mankind had free energy and so we have the world we have now. Professor Priss was placed in charge of its development by the board of Bloom Enterprises, and in time he was as rich and famous as ever Edward Bloom had been. And Priss still has two Nobel Prizes in addition.

  Only—

  I keep thinking. Photons smash out from a light source in all directions because they are created at the moment and there is no reason for them to move in one direction more than in another. Air molecules come out of a zero-gravity field in all directions because they enter it in all directions.

  But what about a single billiard ball, entering a zero-gravity field from one particular direction. Does it come out in the same direction or in any direction?

  I’ve inquired delicately, but theoretical physicists don’t seem to be sure, and I can find no record that Bloom Enterprises, which is the only organization working with zero-gravity fields, has ever experimented in the matter. Someone at the organization once told me that the uncertainty principle guarantees the random emergence of an object entering in any direction. But then why don’t they try the experiment?

  Could it be, then—

  Could it be that for once Priss’s mind had been working quickly? Could it be that, under the pressure of what Bloom was trying to do to him, Priss had suddenly seen everything. He had been studying the radiation surrounding the zero-gravity volume. He might have realized its cause and been certain of the speed-of-light motion of anything entering the volume.

  Why, then, had he said nothing?

  One thing is certain. Nothing Priss would do at the billiard table could be accidental. He was an expert and the billiard balls did exactly what he wanted them to. I was standing right there. I saw him look at Bloom and then at the table as though he were judging angles.

  I watched him hit that ball. I watched it bounce off the side of the table and move into the zero-gravity volume, heading in one particular direction.

  For when Priss sent that ball toward the zero-gravity volume—and the tri-di films bear me out—it was already aimed directly at Bloom’s heart! Accident? Coincidence?

  Murder?

  THE TIME-TOMBS

  by J. G. Ballard

  I

  Usually in the evenings, while Traxel and Bridges drove off into the sand-sea, Shepley and the Old Man would wander among the gutted time-tombs, listening to them splutter faintly in the dying light as they recreated their fading personas, the deep crystal vaults flaring briefly like giant goblets.

  Most of the time-tombs on the southern edge of the sand-sea had been stripped centuries earlier. But Shepley liked to saunter through the straggle of half-submerged pavilions, the warm ancient sand playing over his bare feet like wavelets on some endless beach. Alone among the flickering tombs, with the empty husks of the past ten thousand years, he could temporarily forget his nagging sense of failure.

  Tonight, however, he would have to forego the walk. Traxel, who was nominally the leader of the group of tomb-robbers, had pointedly warned him at dinner that he must pay his way or leave. For three weeks Shepley had put off going with Traxel and Bridges, making a series of progressively lamer excuses, and they had begun to get impatient with him. The Old Man they would tolerate, for his vast knowledge of the sand-sea—he had combed the decaying tombs for over forty years and knew every reef and therm-pool like the palm of his hand—and because he was an institution that somehow dignified the lowly calling of tomb-robber, but Shepley had been there for only three months and had nothing to offer except his morose silences and self-hate.

  “Tonight, Shepley,” Traxel told him firmly in his hard clipped voice, “you must find a tape. We cannot support you indefinitely. Remember, were all as eager to leave Vergil as you are.”

  Shepley nodded, watching his reflection in the gold finger bowl. Traxel sat at the head of the tilting table, his high-collared velvet jacket unbuttoned. Surrounded by the battered gold plate filched from the tombs, red wine spilling across the table from Bridges’ tankard, he looked more like a Renaissance princeling than a cashiered Ph.D. from Tycho U. Once Traxel had been Professor of Semantics, and Shepley wondered what scandal had brought him to Vergil. Now, like a grave-rat, he hunted the time-tombs with Bridges, selling the tapes to the Psycho-History Museums at a dollar a foot. Shepley found it impossible to come to terms with the tall, aloof man. By contrast Bridges, who was just a thug, had a streak of blunt good humor that made him tolerable, but with Traxel he could never relax. Perhaps his cold laconic manner represented authority, the highfaced, stern-eyed interrogators who still pursued Shepley in his dreams.

  Bridges lacked back his chair and lurched away around the table, pounding Shepley across the shoulders.

  “You come with us, kid. Tonight we’ll find a mega-tape.”

  Outside, the low-hulled, camouflaged half-trade waited in a saddle between two dunes. The old summer palace was sinking slowly below the desert, and the floor of the banqueting hall shelved into the white sand like the deck of a subsiding liner, going down with lights blazing from its staterooms.

  “What about you, Doctor?” Traxel asked the Old Man as Bridges swung aboard the half-track and the exhaust kicked out. “It would be a pleasure to have you along.” When the Old Man shook his head Traxel turned to Shepley. “Well, are you coming?”

  “Not tonight,” Shepley demurred hurriedly. “I’ll, er, walk down to the tomb-beds later myself.”

  “Twenty miles?” Traxel reminded him, watching reflectively. “Very well.” He zipped up his jacket and strode away towards the half-track. As they moved off he shouted: “Shepley, I meant what I said!”

  Shepley watched them disappear among the dunes. Flatly, he repeated: “He means what he says.”

  The Old Man shrugged, sweeping some sand off the table. “Traxel . . . he’s a difficult man. What are you going to do?” The note of reproach in his voice was mild, realizing that Shepley’
s motives were the same as those which had marooned himself on the lost beaches of the sand-sea four decades earlier.

  Shepley snapped irritably. “I can’t go with him. After five minutes he drains me like a skull. What’s the matter with Traxel, why is he here?”

  The Old Man stood up, staring out vaguely into the desert. “I can’t remember. Everyone has his own reasons. After a while the stories overlap.”

  They walked out under the proscenium, following the grooves left by the half-track. A mile away, winding between the last of the lava-lakes which marked the southern shore of the sand-sea, they could just see the vehicle vanishing into the darkness. The old tomb-beds, where Shepley and the Old Man usually walked, lay between them, the pavilions arranged in three lines along a low basaltic ridge. Occasionally a brief flare of light flickered up into the white, bonelike darkness, but most of the tombs were silent.

  Shepley stopped, hands falling limply to his sides. “The new beds are by the Lake of Newton, nearly twenty miles away. I can’t follow them.”

  “I shouldn’t try,” the Old Man rejoined. “There was a big sandstorm last night. The time-wardens will be out in force marking any new tombs uncovered.” He chuckled softly to himself. “Traxel and Bridges won’t find a foot of tape—they’ll be lucky if they’re not arrested.” He took off his white cotton hat and squinted shrewdly through the dead light, assessing the altered contours of the dunes, then guided Shepley towards the old mono-rail whose southern terminus ended by the tomb-beds. Once it had been used to transport the pavilions from the station on the northern shore of the sand-sea, and a small gyro-car still leaned against the freight platform. “We’ll go over to Pascal. Something may have come up, you never know.”

  Shepley shook his head. “Traxel took me there when I first arrived. They’ve all been stripped a hundred times.”