The voice had a chilled steel ring that sent my heart right down into my shoes. There was no mercy in it, no compassion, no pity. It was double-edged with the threat of death. It jerked my head around. Marvak was standing there in the office. He had the gun out of his pocket now, pointing it straight at me. There was a closet in the office. Marvak had simply waited in the closet until I entered. When I started up the stairs, he had stepped out behind me. "I--I must have got the wrong ad--address," I faltered. His eyes, gray chilled steel, they were, drilled into me. "No doubt," he said--but very doubtfully. "You're the reporter I noticed at the meeting, aren't you? What are you doing here?" How big a lie could I tell and still be safe? How close to the truth could I come and not get one of those slugs between my eyes? "I came out to interview Mr. Fradin," I blurted out. He seemed to let it go, but back of those cold gray eyes I could see his mind working as he decided what to do with me. Then I saw him reach a decision. First, he searched me. I didn't have a gun, which seemed to surprise him. "You can come along," he said. "If Fradin can demonstrate to my satisfaction the discovery he claimed to have made, it will make the headlines, _if_ you get a chance to write it." With that, he dug the little inventor out of the closet, and with the gun out, prodded both of us upstairs. There were only two floors to this building and the entire second floor was Fradin's laboratory. * * * * * It was crammed to the ceiling with the weirdest collection of electrical equipment I have ever seen. Generators, dynamos, electric motors. There was enough radio equipment to set up a modest broadcasting station. And in one corner was something big enough to be a cyclotron. Fradin had just about everything in his laboratory. "Now," said Marvak to the little inventor, "you will please prove the truth of your assertion that power can be transmitted by radio." That was the thing that Fradin had said. Power by radio! It doesn't sound like much, but let me tell you, it's plenty big. With it, science could come darned close to remaking the face of the globe. How? This is the power age. Practically all of our industrial achievements--and through them we have achieved what passes for civilization--have come about through cheap power. Coal, the steam engine, the dynamo, water power. Maybe, not so long in the future, we'll have atomic power, but we don't have it yet. All we have now are coal and water. And possibly 90% of the water power in this country and probably 95% of the water power on earth are going to waste, simply because the waterfalls are usually in mountains and the places where the current is to be used are in cities hundreds and even thousands of miles away. _Transmission losses over high lines are so great that electrical energy cannot be efficiently transmitted very far._ So the water power goes to waste.