Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC

by George O. Smith

  “Yes, if Miss Westland knows where to find you.”

  “She will I’ll inform her of my whereabouts.”

  “I may want to consult you after I read the reports.”

  “That will be all right. The autocall can find me anywhere on Venus Equilateral, if I’m not at the place Miss Westland calls.”

  Don Channing stopped at Arden’s desk. “I’m booted,” he told her.

  “Leaving Venus Equilateral?” she asked with concern.

  “No, blond and beautiful, I’m just shunted back to my own office.”

  “Can’t I go with you?” pleaded the girl.

  “Nope. You are to stay here and be a nice, good-looking Mata Hari. This bird seems to think that he can run Venus Equilateral like a bus or a factory. I know the type, and the first thing he’ll do is to run the place into a snarl. Keep me informed of anything complicated, will you?”

  “Sure. And where are you going now?”

  “I’m going down and get Walt Franks. We’re going to inspect the transparency of a new type of glass.”

  “I didn’t know that optical investigations come under your jurisdiction.”

  “This investigation will consist of a visit to the ninth level.”

  “Can’t you take me along?”

  “Not today,” he grinned “Your new boss does not believe in the evils of looking through the bottom of a glass. We must behave with decorum. We must forget fun. We are now operating under a man who will commercialize electronics to a fine art.”

  “Don’t get stewed. He may want to know where the electrons are kept.”

  “I’m not going to drink that much. Walt and I need a discussion,” he said. “And in the meantime, haul my spinach out of the office, will you, and take it back to the electronics office? I’ll be needing it back there.”

  “O.K., Don,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”

  Channing left to go to the ninth level. He stopped long enough to collect Walt Franks.

  Over a tall glass of beer, Channing told Franks of Burbank’s visit. And why.

  Only one thing stuck in Franks’ mind. “Did you say that he might close Joe’s?” asked Franks.

  “He said that if it were in his power to do so, he would.”

  “Heaven forbid. Where will we go to be alone?”

  “Alone?” snorted Channing. The barroom was half filled with people, being the only drinking establishment for sixty-odd million miles.

  “Well, you know what I mean.”

  “I could smuggle in a few cases of beer,” suggested Don.

  “Couldn’t we smuggle him out?”

  “That would be desirable. But I think he is here to stay. Darn it all, why do they have to appoint some confounded political pal to a job like this? I’m telling you, Walt, he must weigh two hundred if he weighs a pound. He holds his stomach on his lap when he sits down.”

  Walt looked up and down Channing’s slender figure. “Well, he won’t be holding Westland on his lap if it is filled with stomach.”

  “I never hold Westland on my lap—”

  “No?”

  “—during working hours!” Channing finished. He grinned at Franks and ordered another beer. “And how is the Office of Beam Control going to make out under the new regime?”

  “I’ll answer that after I see how the new regime treats the Office of Beam Control,” answered Franks. “I doubt that he can do much to bugger things up in my office; There aren’t many cheaper ways to direct a beam, you know.”

  “Yeah. You’re safe.”

  “But what I can’t understand is why they didn’t continue you in that job. You’ve been handling the business ever since last December, when Peters got sick. You’ve been doing all right.”

  “Doing all right just means that I’ve been carrying over Peters’ methods and ideas. What the commission wants, apparently, is something new. Ergo, the new broom.”

  “Personally, I like that one about the old shoes being more comfortable,” said Franks. “If you say the right word, Don, I’ll slip him a dose of high voltage. That should fix him.”

  “I think that the better way would be to work for the bird. Then when he goes, I’ll have his recommendation.”

  “Phooey,” snorted Franks. “They’ll just appoint another political pal. They’ve tried it before and they’ll try it again. I wonder what precinct he carries.”

  The telephone rang in the bar, and the bartender, after answering, motioned to Walt Franks. “You’re wanted in your office,” said the bartender. “And besides,” he told Channing, “if I’m going to get lunch for three thousand people, you’d better trot along, too. It’s nearly eleven o’clock, you know, and the first batch of two hundred will be coming in.”

  Joe was quite inaccurate as to the figures. The complement of Venus Equilateral was just shy of twenty-seven hundred. They worked in three eight-hour shifts, about nine hundred to a shift. They had their breakfast, lunch, and dinner hours staggered so that at no time was there more than about two hundred people in the big lunchroom. The bar, it may be mentioned, was in a smaller room at one end of the much larger cafeteria.

  The Venus Equilateral Relay Station was a modern miracle of engineering if you liked to believe the books. Actually, Venus Equilateral was an asteroid that had been shoved into its orbit about the Sun, forming a practical demonstration of the equilateral triangle solution of the Three Moving Bodies. It was a long cylinder, about three miles in length by about a mile in diameter.

  In 1946, the United States Army Signal Corps succeeded in sending forth and receiving in return a radar signal from the moon. This was an academic triumph; at that time such a feat had no practical value. Its value came later when the skies were opened up for travel; when men crossed the void of space to colonize the nearer planets, Mars and Venus.

  They found, then, that communications back and forth depended upon the initial experiment in 1946.

  But there were barriers, even in deep space. The penetration of the Heaviside Layer was no great problem. That had been done. But they found that Sol, our sun, was often in the path of the communications beam because the planets all make their way around Sol at different rates of speed.

  All too frequently Mars is on the opposite side of the sun from Terra, or Sol might lie between Venus and Mars. Astronomically, this situation where two planets lie on opposite sides of the sun is called Major Opposition, which is an appropriate name even though those who named it were not thinking in terms of communications.

  The concept of Sol being between two planets and interfering with communication does not mean a true physical alignment. The Sun is a tremendous generator of radiothermal energy, so that communication begins to fail when the other planet is 15 to 20 degrees from the Sun. Thus, from 30 to 40 degrees of opposition passage, Venus Equilateral is a necessary relay station.

  To circumvent this natural barrier to communications, mankind made use of one of the classic solutions of the problem of the Three Moving Bodies, in which is it stated that three celestial objects at the corners of an equilateral triangle will so remain, rotating about their common center of gravity. This equilateral position between the sun and any planet is called the “Trojan” position because it has been known for some time that a group of asteroids precedes and follows Jupiter around in its orbit. The “Trojan” comes from the fact that these asteroids bear the well-known names of the heroes of the famous Trojan War.

  To communicate around the sun, then, it is only necessary to establish a relay station in the Trojan position of the desired planet. This will be either ahead or behind the planet in its orbit; and the planet, the sun, and the station will form an equilateral triangle.

  So was born the Venus Equilateral Relay Station.

  Little remained of the original asteroid. At the present time, the original rock had been discarded to make room for the ever-growing personnel and material that were needed to operate the relay station. What had been an asteroid with machinery was now a huge pi
le of machinery with people. The insides, formerly of spongy rock, were now neatly cubed off into offices, rooms, hallways, and so on, divided by sheets of steel. The outer surface, once rugged and forbidding, was now all shiny steel. The small asteroid, a tiny thing, was gone, the station having overflowed the asteroid soon after men found that uninterrupted communication was possible between the worlds.

  Now the man-made asteroid carried twenty-seven hundred people. There were stores, offices, places of recreation, churches, marriages, deaths, and everything but taxes. Judging by its population, it was a small town.

  Venus Equilateral rotated about its axis. On the inner surface of its double-walled shell were the homes of the people—not cottages, but apartmental cubicles, one, two, three, six rooms. Centrifugal force made a little more than one Earth G of artificial gravity. Above this shell of apartments, the offices began. Offices, recreation centers, and so on. Up in the central position, where the gravity was nil or near-nil, the automatic machinery was placed: the servogvroscopes and their beam finders, the storerooms, the air plant, the hydroponic farms, and all other things that needed little or no gravity for well-being.

  This was the Venus Equilateral Relay Station, sixty degrees ahead of the planet Venus, on Venus’ orbit. Often closer to Terra than Venus, the relay station offered a perfect place to relay messages through whenever Mars or Terra was on the other side of the Sun. It was seldom idle, for it was seldom that Mars and Venus were in such a position that direct communications between all the three planets was possible.

  This was the center of Interplanetary Communications. This was the main office. It was the heart of the Solar System’s communication line, and as such, it was well manned. Orders for everything emanated from Venus Equilateral. It was a delicate proposition, Venus Equilateral was, and hence the present-on-all-occasions official capacities and office staff.

  This was the organization that Don Channing hoped /to direct. A closed corporation with one purpose in mind: interplanetary communication!

  -

  Channing wondered if the summons for Walt Franks was an official one. Returning to the electronics office, Don punched the communicator and asked: “Is Walt in there?”

  Arden’s voice came back: “No, but Burbank is in Franks’ office. Wanna listen?”

  “Eavesdropper! Using the communicator?”

  “Sure.”

  “Better shut it off,” Don warned. “Burbank isn’t foolish, you know, and there are pilot lights and warning flags on those things to tell if someone has the key open. I wouldn’t want to see you fired for listening in.”

  “All right but it was getting interesting.”

  “If I’m betting on the right horse,” said Channing, “this will be interesting for all before it is finished.”

  -

  Seven days went by in monotonous procession. Seven days in a world of constant climate. One week, marked only by the changing of work shifts and the clocks that marked off the eight-hour periods. Seven days unmarred by rain or cold or heat. Seven days of uninterrupted sunshine that flickered in and out of the sealed viewports with eye-searing brilliance, coming and going as the station rotated.

  But in the front offices, things were not serene. Not that monotony ever set in seriously in the engineering department, but that sacred sanctum of all-things-that-didn’t-behave-as-they-should found that even their usual turmoil was worse. There was nothing that a person could set his fingers on directly. It was more of a quiet, undercover nature. On Monday, Francis Burbank sent around a communiqué” removing the option of free messages for the personnel. On Tuesday, he remanded the years-long custom of permitting the supply ships to carry, free, packages from friends at home. On Wednesday, Burbank decided that there should be a curfew on the one and only beer emporium. “Curfew” was a revision made after he found that complete curtailing of all alcoholic beverages might easily lead to a more moral problem; there being little enough to do with one’s spare time. On Thursday, he set up a stiff-necked staff of censors for the moving picture house. On Friday, he put a tax on cigarettes and candy. On Saturday, he installed time clocks in all the laboratories and professional offices, where previous to his coming, men had come for work a half-hour late and worked an hour overtime at night.

  On Sunday—

  Don Channing stormed into the Director’s office with a scowl on his face.

  “Look,” he said, “for years we have felt that any man, woman, or child who was willing to come out here was worth all the freedom and consideration that we could give them. What about this damned tax on cigarettes? And candy? And who told you to stop our folks from telling their folks that they are still in good health? And why stop them from sending packages of candy, cake, mementoes, clothing, soap, mosquito dope, liquor, or anything else? And did you ever think that a curfew is something that can be applied only when time is one and the same for all? On Venus Equilateral, Mr. Burbank, six o’clock in the evening is two hours after dinner for one group, two hours after going to work for the second group, and mid-sleep for the third. Then this matter of cutting all love scenes, drinking, female vampires, banditry, bedroom items, murders, and sweater girls out of the movies? We are a selected group and well prepared to take care of our morality. Any man or woman going offside would be heaved out quick. Why, after years of personal freedom, do we find ourselves under the authority of a veritable dictatorship?”

  Francis Burbank was not touched. “I’ll trouble you to keep to your own laboratory,” he told Channing. “Perhaps your own laxity in matters of this sort is the reason why the commission preferred someone better prepared. You speak of many things. There will be more to come. I‘ll answer some of your questions. Why should we permit our profits to be eaten up by people sending messages, cost-free, to their acquaintances all over the minor planets? Why should valuable space for valuable supplies be taken up with personal favors between friends? And if the personnel wants to smoke and drink, let them pay for the privilege! It will help to pay for the high price of shipping the useless items out from the nearest planet—as well as saving of precious storage space!”

  “But you’re breeding ill will among the employees,” Channing objected.

  “Any who prefer to do so may leave!” snapped Burbank.

  “You may find it difficult to hire people to spend their lives in a place that offers no sight of a sky or a breath of fresh air. The people here may go home to their own planets to find that smell of fresh, spring air is more desirable than a climate that never varies from the personal optimum. I wonder, occasionally, if it might not be possible to instigate some sort of cold snap or a rainy season just for the purpose of bringing to the members of Venus Equilateral some of the surprises that are to be found in Chicago or New York. Hell, even Canalopsis has an occasional rainstorm!”

  “Return to your laboratory,” said Burbank coldly. “And let me run the station. Why should we spend useful money to pamper people? I don’t care if Canalopsis does have an occasional storm, we are not on Mars, we are in Venus Equilateral. You tend to your end of the business and I’ll do as I deem fitting for the station!”

  Channing mentally threw up his hands and literally stalked out of the office. Here was a close-knit organization being shot full of holes by a screwball. He stamped down to the ninth level and beat upon the closed door of Joe’s. The door remained closed.

  Channing beat with his knuckles until they bled. Finally a door popped open down the hallway fifty yards and a man looked out. His head popped in again, and within thirty seconds the door to Joe’s opened and admitted Channing.

  Joe slapped the door shut behind Channing quickly.

  “What in hell are you operating, Joe—a speakeasy?”

  “The next time you want in,” Joe informed him, “knock on 902 twice, 914 once, and then here four times. We’ll let you in. And now, don’t say anything too loud.” Joe put a finger to his lips and winked broadly. “Even the walls listen,” he said in a stage whisper.


  He led Channing into the room and put on the light. There was a flurry of people who tried to hide their glasses under the table. “Never mind,” called Joe. “It’s only Dr. Channing.”

  The room relaxed.

  “I want something stiff,” Channing told Joe. “I’ve just gone three rounds with His Nibs and came out cold.”

  Some people within earshot asked about it. Channing explained what had transpired. The people seemed satisfied that Channing had done his best for them. The room relaxed into routine.

  The signal knock came on the door and was opened to admit Walt Franks and Arden Westland. Franks looked as though he had been given a stiff workout in a cement mixer.

  “Scotch,” said Arden. “And a glass of brew for the lady.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He’s been trying to keep to Burbank’s latest suggestions.”

  “You’ve been working too hard,” Channing chided him gently. “This is the wrong time to mention it, I suppose, but did that beam slippage have anything to do with your condition—or was it vice versa?”

  “You know that I haven’t anything to do with the beam controls personally,” said Franks. He straightened up and faced Channing defiantly.

  “Don’t get mad. What was it?”

  “Mastermind, up there, called me in to see if there were some manner or means of tightening the beam. I told him, sure, we could hold the beam to practically nothing. He asked me why we didn’t hold the beam to a parallel and save the dispersed power. He claimed that we could reduce power by two to one if more of it came into the station instead of being smeared all over the firmament I, foolishly, agreed with him. He’s right. You could. But only if everything is immobilized. I’ve been trying to work out some means of controlling the beam magnetically so that it would compensate for the normal variations due to magnetic influences. So far I’ve failed.”