CHAPTER TWO
Russell Page squinted thoughtful eyes at the thing he had created—a transparent cloud, a visible, sharply outlined cloud of something. It was visible as a piece of glass is visible, as a globe of water is visible. There it lay, within his apparatus, a thing that shouldn't be.
"I believe we have something there, Harry," he said slowly.
Harry Wilson sucked at the cigarette that drooped from the corner of his mouth, blew twin streams of smoke from his nostrils. His eyes twitched nervously.
"Yeah," he said. "Anti-entropy."
"All of that," said Russell Page. "Perhaps a whole lot more."
"It stops all energy change," said Wilson, "as if time stood still and things remained exactly as they were when time had stopped."
"It's more than that," Page declared. "It conserves not only energy in toto, not only the energy of the whole, but the energy of the part. It is perfectly transparent, yet it has refractive qualities. It won't absorb light because to do so would change its energy content. In that field, whatever is hot stays hot, whatever is cold can't gain heat."