A Cosmic Christmas

by Hank Davis

  “Pluto?”

  “Uh-huh. In effect, it is like trying to warm Pluto from the energy contained in that room. Obviously we aren’t going to melt much of the solid-frozen atmosphere of Pluto nor create a warm and habitable planet of it. We can run the temperature down to damn near Nothing Kelvin without doing much of anything to Pluto.”

  “We’re below the black-body temperature of Mars right now,” said Walt. “And the gadgetry is working so much better that we’re going to run it down to as far as we can get it.”

  “What do you hope to find?” asked Barney.

  “Why, it looks as though we can make a set of crystals that will permit instantaneous communication from one to the other.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Looks good, so far,” said Channing. “Want to see it?”

  Christine looked at the thermometer set in the face of the door. She turned back to the others and shook her head vehemently.

  “Not for all the ice in Siberia,” she said fervently.

  Walt brightened. “How about some ice in a glass,” he said.

  “For medical purposes only,” agreed Barney. “It’s been deadly cold on Mars—about a quart and a half of sheer and utter cold.”

  “Been cold in there, too,” said Don. “Arden, you’re out of luck—you’ve stayed out of the cold.”

  “You try to freeze me out of this session,” said Arden, “and you’ll find that I have the coldest shoulder in the Solar System.”

  * * *

  As the party from Mars had left the platform of the spacecraft poised on the landing stage of Venus Equilateral, another landing was made. This landing came from the same ship, but unlike the arrival of the Balers and Barney Carroll, the later landing was unseen, unknown, and unwanted.

  Mark Kingman had been a stowaway.

  Now, most stowaways are apprehended because success in such a venture is difficult. To properly stow away, it is calculated that more than the nominal cost of the trip must be spent in planning and preparation. Also, there is the most difficult of all problems—that of stepping blithely ashore under the watchful eye of a purser or authority whose business it is to see that all the passengers who embarked ultimately disembark—no more and no less; plus or minus zero. (It is considered that an infant born aboard ship is a legal passenger and not a stowaway. This is a magnanimity on the part of the transportation companies, who understand that they might have difficulty in persuading any court that the will exists to defraud the company of rightful revenues, etc. A death and burial at sea is also ignored; the transportation company has already collected for a full fare!) But Mark Kingman had done it. He had come aboard in a large packing case, labeled:

  CERTIFIED UNIQUE!

  (Identium Protected)

  Under NO Circumstances Will DUPLICATOR or

  MATTER TRANSMITTER Be Tolerated

  With magnificent sophistry, Kingman was within the letter of the law that did not permit false representation of contained merchandise. For he, a human being, was a certified unique, he having never been under the beam of the integrator scanning beam of the matter duplicator or transmitter. Nor had any other living human, for that matter. The identium protection was insurance on all such cargoes; it prevented some overly—or underly—bright clerk from slipping the package into a duplicator to make shipping easier. Identium exploded rather violently under the impact of the scanner beam, it will be recalled.

  Along with Kingman was a small battery-operated duplicator, and a set of recordings. The duplicator produced fresh air as needed, water, food, and even books, games, and puzzles for solitary entertainment. Waste material went into the matter bank, proving the earlier statements that with a well-equipped duplicator and a set of recordings, any man can establish a completely closed system that will be valid for any length of time desired.

  When the ship landed, Kingman tossed all the loose material into the duplicator and reduced it to non-homogenous matter in the matter bank. Then he turned the duplicator beam against the sidewall of the huge box and watched the sidewall disappear into the machine.

  He stepped out through the opening, which was calculated to miss the concealed plates of identium installed to prevent just this very thing. Kingman, of course, had planned it that way.

  Once outside, Kingman set the duplicator on the deck between other cases and snapped the switch. The scanner beam produced books from Kingman’s own library which he packed in the case. Then, by reversing the direction of depth scan without changing the vertical or horizontal travel, Kingman effected a completed reversal of the restoration. The side of the packing case was reestablished from the inside out, from the original recording, which, of course, was made from the other side. It reformed perfectly, leaving no seam.

  Kingman went down an unused shaft to the bottom of the ship, where he drilled down with the duplicator through the ship where it stood upon the landing stage. Down through the stage he went and into a between-deck volume that was filled with girders.

  He reset the duplicator and replaced the landing stage and the ship’s hull.

  By the time the party had adjourned to Joe’s, Mark Kingman was high in the relay station, near the center line and a full mile and a half from the landing stage. He was not far from the vast room that once contained a lush growth of Martian sawgrass, used before the advent of the duplicator for the purification of the atmosphere in Venus Equilateral.

  He was reasonably safe. He knew that the former vast storages of food and supply were no longer present and, that being the case, that few people would be coming up to this out-of-the-way place almost a third of a mile above the outer radius of the station, where the personnel of Venus Equilateral lived and worked.

  He started his duplicator and produced a newly charged battery first. He tossed the old one into the matter bank. He’d have preferred a solar energy tube, but he was not too certain of Sol’s position from there and so he had to forego that.

  Next, he used the duplicator to produce a larger duplicator, and that duplicator to make a truly vast one. The smaller numbers he shoved into the larger one.

  From the huge duplicator, Kingman made great energy beam tubes and the equipment to run them. Taking his time, Kingman set them up and adjusted them carefully.

  He pressed the starting button.

  Then a complete connection was established between an area high in the station but a good many thousand feet away—and on the other side of the central axis—through the energy beam tubes, and a very distant receptor tube on the planet Pluto.

  “This,” punned Kingman, “will freeze ’em out!”

  His final act before relaxing completely was to have the huge duplicator build a small but comfortable house, complete with furniture and an efficient heating plant. Then he settled down to wait for developments.

  “So what brings you out to Venus Equilateral?” asked Don.

  “Christmas,” said Barney. “We—Christine—thought that it might be nice to spend Christmas with old friends in a climate less violent than Mars.”

  “Well, we’re all tickled pink,” nodded Arden.

  “Frankly,” Jim Baler grinned, “my Channing sister has set her sights on your bachelor playmate.”

  “I think it is mutual,” said Arden. “After all, Walt has had a lot of business to tend to on Mars. He used to use the beams to conduct business—in fact, he still does most of it by communications when it isn’t Mars—but give him three ten-thousandths of an excuse and he’s heading for Canalopsis.”

  “I noted with interest that Christine was quite willing to help him work.”

  “Fat lot of work they’ll accomplish.”

  “Speaking of work, Wes, what goes on right now in this deal?” Don asked.

  “We’ve just set up a modulator,” said Wes. “I’m modulating the current since the magnetic field is supplied by a permanent magnet and the monochromatic light comes from an ion arc. Using varying light seems to widen the response band with a loss in transmiss
ion intensity. This way, you see, all the energy going into the crystal is transmitted on a single band, which is of course a matter of concentrated transmission.”

  “That sounds sensible. Also, if this gets to sounding practical, it is quite simple to establish and maintain a high-charge permanent magnet field, and also a monochromatic light from a continuous gas arc. Easier, I’d say, than making ammeters all read alike.”

  “Utopia,” said Wes Farrell, “is where you can use any handy meter and find it within one-tenth of one percent of any other—including the Interplanetary Standard.”

  Channing observed that Utopia was far from achieved. Then he said: “You’ve got the Thomas gents out in a ship with another crystal setup?”

  “Anopheles,” said Farrell, “will shortly head for Mars with the other half of the gear in another refrigerated compartment. If this proves practical, Pluto is going to become useful.”

  Arden nodded absently. “I’ve always claimed that there is a practical use for everything.”

  Channing opened his mouth to say something and had it neatly plugged by Arden’s small hand. “No, you don’t.” she said. “We’ve all heard that one.”

  “Which one?” asked Farrell.

  “The one about the navel being a fine place to hold the salt when you’re eating celery in bed,” said Arden.

  Channing removed Arden’s hand from his mouth and placed it in hers. “You done it,” he told her ungrammatically. “For which I’ll not tell you what Walt and Christine are doing right now.”

  Arden’s attempt to say, “Pooh. I know,” was thoroughly stifled and it came out as a muffled mumble.

  Channing turned to Wes and asked: “Have any good theories on this thing?”

  Farrell nodded. “I noted that the energy entering the crystal was not dissipated as heat. Yet there was quite a bit of energy going in, and I wanted to know where it was going. Apparently, the energy going into the crystal will only enter under the influence of a magnetic field. Changing the field strength of the magnet changes the band, for the transmission to the similar crystal ceases until the other one has had its magnetic field reduced in synchronous amount. Also, no energy is taken by the crystal unless there is an attuned crystal. The power just generates heat, then, as should be normal.”

  “So,” said Wes thoughtfully, “the propagation of this communicable medium is powered by the energy going into the crystal. Crystals tend to vibrate in sympathy with one another: hitting one with a light hammer will make the other one ring, and vice versa. I’ve tried it with three of them, and it makes a complete three-way hookup. As soon as Chuck and Freddie Thomas get out a good way, we’ll be able to estimate the velocity of propagation, though I think it is the same as that other alloy transmission band we’ve been using.”

  Channing grinned. “The speed of light, squared?”

  Farrell winced. That argument was still going on, whether or not you could square a velocity. “We’ll know,” he said quietly.

  The loudspeaker above Farrell’s desk hissed slightly, and the voice of Freddie Thomas came in: “I’m about to trust my precious life once more to the tender care of the harebrained piloting of my semi-idiot brother. Any last words you’d like to have uttered?”

  Wes picked up a microphone and said: “Nothing that will bear transmission under the rules. If there’s anything I want to tell you, I’ll call you on this—and if this doesn’t work, we’ll try the standard. They’re on your course?”

  “On the button all the way—they tell me.”

  “Well, if you jiggle any, call us,” said Farrell, “either on the standard space phone or this coupled-crystal setup.”

  Channing grinned. “So it has a name?”

  Freddie laughed. “We never did settle on a name for the driver-radiation communication system. So we’re starting this one off right. It’s the Coupled-Crystal Communicator. For short, ‘Seesee,’ see?”

  Channing returned the laugh. “‘Seeseesee,’ or ‘Seesee’ understand?’”

  Chuck Thomas chimed in. “My semi-moronic brother will delay this takeoff if he doesn’t sharpen up,” he said. “What he means is: Seesee, or Get it?”

  “I get it,” replied Channing.

  And they did get it. Hour followed hour and day followed day from takeoff to turnover, where there was no Doppler effect even though the velocity of the ship was fiercely high.

  The hours fled by in a working flurry of tests and experiments and almost constant talk between the arrowing ship and Venus Equilateral . . .

  “It doesn’t add up,” Walt Franks complained.

  Christine looked up from her book and waited.

  “Something’s more’n we bargained for,” he said.

  “What?” asked Christine.

  “Why, that area we’re chilling off is cooling far too fast.”

  “I should think that would be an advantage,” said Christine.

  “Maybe—and maybe not,” said Walt. “The big thing is that things should behave according to rules. When they do not, then’s when people make discoveries that lead to new rules.”

  “That, I don’t follow,” said Christine.

  “Well, in this case we know to several decimal places the heat equivalent of electrical energy. Three thousand, four hundred thirteen kilowatt hours equals one BTU—a British Thermal Unit. We know the quantity of electrical power—the number of kilowatts—being coursed through the tubes en route to Pluto. We know by calculation just how many calories of heat there are in the area we’re cooling off—and therefore we can calculate the time it will take to reduce the temperature of that area a given number of degrees Centigrade. We’re about double.”

  “And—you were starting to explain something different,” said Christine.

  “Oh. Yes. Well, for a number of years—several thousand, in fact—it was taught that a heavy mass falls faster than a light mass. Then Galileo tossed rocks off the Tower of Pisa and showed that a small stone and a large stone fall equally fast. That was a case where definitely provable evidence was at variance with the rules. They couldn’t revise the actuality, so they had to revise the rules.”

  “I see. And now because that area is cooling off much faster than anticipated, you anticipate that something is not behaving according to the rules?”

  “Bright girl,” chuckled Walt.

  “Thank you, kind sir.” Christine laughed. “But remember that I was raised in a bright family.”

  “Come on,” said Walt. “We’re going to investigate.”

  “In that cold room?” Christine asked with some concern.

  Walt nodded. “You’ll get used to it,” he said absently, collecting a few instruments.

  “Look, Walt,” said Christine in a scathing tone, “I am used to it! That’s why I came to Venus Equilateral from Mars. Remember?”

  Walt looked at her, wondering. But Christine wore a smile that took most of the sting out of her words.

  “Lead on, Walt. I can take a bit of chill. In fact,” she said with a half-smile, “under the proper circumstances, a bit of chill is fun.”

  Walt finished collecting his equipment and packed it into two carrying cases. Then, from a closet, he took electrically warmed clothing, helped Christine into hers, climbed into his own, and they took the long trek along corridors and up elevators to the cold room.

  “It’s cold even here,” said Christine.

  “The room leaks bad,” said Walt. “Wes Farrell’s hobby these days is making synthetic elements on the duplicator—he uses a filter to get a monoatomic pattern and then heterodynes the resulting signal to atomic patterns above the transuranic system. But in all of Wes Farrell’s playing at making synthetic transuranic elements, he hasn’t come up with anything like a good heat insulator yet. We did toy with the idea of hermetically sealing in a double wall and piping some of the vacuum of interstellar space in there. But it was too vast a project. So we let some heat leak, and to hell with it.”

  Christine shuddered. “I’ve neve
r really appreciated the fact that Venus Equilateral is really just a big steel capsule immersed in the vacuum of interplanetary space,” she said. “It’s so much like a town on Terra.”

  “Inside, that is,” grinned Walt. “There’s a nice queasy thrill awaiting you when first you stand in an observation blister made of plastiglass.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because first you’re terrified because you are standing on a bubble that is eminently transparent and looking down beneath your feet, you see the stars in the sky. You know that ‘down’ to the working and residence section of the station is actually ‘out and away’ from the axis of the station, since it revolves about the long axis to provide a simulated gravity plus gyroscopic action to stabilize the beam stage and pointers. Well, when you go down—and again ‘down’ is a relative term, meaning the direction of gravitic thrust—into one of the blisters, your mind is appalled at the fact that your feet are pressing against something that your eyes have always told you is ‘up.’ The stars. And then you realize that between you and the awesome void of space is just that thin glass.

  “You end up,” he grinned, “being very careful about banging your heels on the floor of the station for about a week.”

  “Well, thanks for the preparation,” said Christine.

  “You’ll still go through it,” he told her. “But just remember that anybody on the other side of the station, standing in a similar blister a mile ‘above’ your head, is standing feet ‘upward’ with respect to you. But he, too, is being thrown out and away by centrifugal force.”

  Walt put his equipment down and rummaged through it. He selected a supersensitive thermocouple and bridge and fixed the couple to one of the fixtures in the room. He balanced the bridge after the swinging needle came to a halt—when the thermocouple junction had assumed the temperature of the fixture.

  “Now,” he said, “we’ll read that at the end of a half-hour and we’ll then calculate the caloric outgo and balance it against the kilowatts heading out through the energy beam.”