Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 247: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

more. It’s not nice to be caught like that. They found a fellow that had happened to just a day or so ago over near one of the Twilight Belt stations.” But Page was gone, slamming the door. The Candles had stopped dancing and were rolling around, drifting bubbles of every hue. Occasionally one would essay the formation of some object, but the attempt would be halfhearted and the Candle once more would revert to its natural sphere. Old Creepy must have put his fiddle away, Craig thought. Probably he was making an inspection round, seeing if everything was all right. However, there was little chance that anything could go wrong. The plant was automatic, designed to run with the minimum of human attention. The control room was a wonder of clicking, chuckling, chortling, snicking gadgets—gadgets that kept the flow of power directed to the substations on the Twilight Belt, that kept the tight beams from the substations centered exactly on those points in space where each must go to be picked up by the substations circling the outer planets. Let one of those gadgets fail;—let that soaceward beam Sway as much as a fraction of a degree—Curt shuddered at the thought of a beam of terrific power smashing into a planet —perhaps into a city. But the mechanism had never failed; it never would. It was foolproof and a far cry from the day when the planet had charged monstrous banks of converters to be carted to the outer worlds by lumbering Space ships. This was really free power, easy power, plentiful power: power carried across millions of miles on Addison's tight- beam principle; free power to develop the farms of Venus, the mines of Mars, the chemical plants and cold laboratories on Pluto. CORniclooo SS CO