Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC

by George O. Smith

  It may sound like a problem for the distant future, this pointing a radio beam at a planet, but it is no different from Galileo’s attempt to see Jupiter through his Optik Glass. Of course, it has had refinements that have enabled man to make several hundred hours of exposure of a star on a photographic plate. So if men maintain a telescope on a star, night after night, to build up a faint image, they can also maintain a beamed transmission wave on a planet.

  All you need is a place to stand: a firm, immobile platform. The three-mile-long, one-mile-diameter mass of Venus Equilateral offered such a platform. It rotated smoothly, and upon its “business” end a hardened and highly polished set of rails maintained projectors that were pointed at the planets. These were parabolic reflectors that focused ultra-high-frequency waves into tight beams which were hurled at Mars, Terra, and Venus for communication.

  And because the beams were acted upon by all of the trivia in the Solar System, highly trained technicians stood their tricks at the beam controls. In fifty million miles, even the bending of electromagnetic waves by the Sun’s mass had to be considered. Sunspots made known their presence. And the vagaries of land transmission were present in a hundred ways due to the distance and the necessity of concentrating every milliwatt of available power on the target.

  This problem of the Empress of Kolain was different Spaceships were invisible, therefore the beam-control man must sight on Mars and the mechanical cam would keep the ship in sight of the beam.

  The hours went past in a peculiar mixture of speed and slowness. On one hand the minutes sped by swiftly and fleetingly, each tick of the clock adding to the lost moments, never to be regained. Time, being precious, seemed to slip through their fingers like sifting sand.

  On the other hand, the time that must be spent in preparation of the equipment went slowly. Always it was in the future, that time when their experiment must either prove a success or a failure. Always there was another hour of preparatory work before the parabolic reflector was mounted; and then another hour before it swung freely and perfectly in its new mounting. Then the minutes were spent in anticipation of the instant that the power stage of transmitter was tested and the megawatts of ultra-high-frequency energy poured into the single rod that acted as a radiator.

  It was a singularly disappointing sight. The rod did not glow, and the reflector was the same as it was before the rod drew power. But the meters read and the generators moaned, and the pyrometers in the insulators mounted as the small quantity of energy lost was converted into heat. So the rod drew power, and the parabolic reflector beamed that power into a tight beam and hurled it out on a die-true line.

  Invisible power that could be used in communications.

  Then the cam was installed. The time went by even slower then, because the cam must be lapped and polished to absolute perfection, not only of its own surface but to absolute concentricity to the shaft on which it turned.

  But eventually the job was finished, and the men stood back, their eyes expectantly upon Don Channing and Walt Franks.

  Don spoke to the man chosen to control the beam. “You can start any time now. Keep her knifed clean, if you can.”

  The man grinned at Channing. “If the devils that roam the void are with us we’ll have no trouble. We should all pray for a phrase used by some characters in a magazine I read once: ‘Clear ether!’ We could use some right now.”

  He applied his eyes to the telescope. He fiddled with the verniers for a brief time, made a major adjustment on a larger handwheel, and then said, without removing his eye from the ‘scope, “That’s it, Dr. Channing.”

  Don answered: “O.K., Jimmy, but you can use the screen now. We aren’t going to make you squint through that pipe for the next few hours straight.”

  “That’s all right I’ll use the screen as soon as you can prove we’re right. Ready?”

  “Ready,” said Channing.

  Franks closed a tiny switch. Below, in the transmitter room, relays clicked and heavy-duty contacts closed with blue fire. Meters began to climb upward across their scales, and the generators moaned in a descending whine. A shielded monitor began to glow, indicating that full power was vomiting from the mouth of the reflector.

  And out from the projector there went, like a spearhead, a wavefront of circularly polarized microwaves. Die-true they sped, crossing the void like a line of sight to an invisible spot above Mars and to the left. Out past the Sun, where they bent inward just enough to make Jimmy’s job tough. Out across the open sky they sped at the velocity of light, and taking sixteen minutes to get there.

  A half-hour passed. “Now,” said Channing, “are we …?”

  Ten minutes went by. The receiver was silent save for a constant crackle of cosmic static.

  Fifteen minutes passed.

  “Nuts,” said Channing. “Could it be that we aren’t quite hitting them?”

  “Could be,” admitted Franks. “Jimmy, waggle that beam a bit, and slowly. When we hit ‘em, we’ll know it because we’ll hear ‘em a half-hour later. Take it easy and slow. We’ve used up thirteen of our fifty-odd hours. We can use another thirty or so just in being sure.”

  Jimmy began to make the beam roam around the invisible spot in the sky. He swept the beam in microscopic scans, up and down, and advancing the beam by one-half of its apparent width at the receiver for each sweep.

  Two more hours went by. The receiver was still silent of reflected signals.

  It was a terrific strain, this necessary wait of approximately a half-hour between each minor adjustment and the subsequent knowledge of failure. Jimmy gave up the ‘scope because of eyestrain, and though Don and Walt had confidence that the beam-control man was competent to use the cross-ruled screen to keep Mars on the beam, Jimmy had been none too sure of himself, and so he’d kept checking the screen against the ‘scope.

  At the end of the next hour of abject failure, Walt Franks began to scribble on a pad of paper. Don came over to peer over Franks’ shoulder, and because he couldn’t read Walt’s mind, he was forced to ask what the engineer was calculating.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Franks.

  “Beginner’s luck?” asked Don with a wry smile.

  “I hope not. Look, Don, we’re moving on the orbit of Venus, at Venus’ orbital velocity. Oh, all right, say it scientifical: we are circling Sol at twenty-one point seven five miles per second. The reflected wave starts back right through the beam, remember?”

  “I get it,” shouted Channing in glee. “Thirty-two minutes’ transmission time at twenty-one point seven five miles per second gives us—ah—”

  Walt looked up from his slide rule. “Fifty-two thousand, two hundred and twenty-four miles,” he said.

  “Just what I was about to say,” grinned Don.

  “But why do you always get there second with your genius?” Walt complained with a pseudo-hurt whine. “So how to establish it?”

  “Can’t use space radar for range,” grunted Channing. “That would louse up the receiver. We’ve got everything shut off tight, you know. How about some visual loran?”

  “Yipe!” Walt exploded. “How?”

  “I’d suggest an optical range finder excepting that the baseline of three miles—the length of Venus Equilateral—isn’t long enough to triangulate for that fifty-two thousand—”

  “Two hundred and twenty-four miles,” Walt finished with a grin. “Proceed, genius, with caution.”

  “So we mount a couple of mirrors at either end of the station, and key a beam of light from the center, heading each way. When the pulses arrive at the space flitter at the same time, he’s in position. We’ll establish original range by radar, of course, but once the proper interval or range is established, the pilot can maintain his own position by watching the pulsed arrival of the twin flickers of light. Just like loran, excepting that we’ll use light, and we can key it so it will run alternately, top and bottom. To maintain the proper angle, all the pilot will have to do is keep the light alternating
—fluently. And overlapping will show him that he’s drifted.”

  “Fine!” Walt glowed. “Now, how long will it take?”

  “Ask the boys, Walt,” suggested Don.

  Walt made a canvass of the machine-shop gang, and came back saying: “Couple of hours, God willing.”

  The mounting of the mirrors at either end of the station took little time. It was the amount of detailed work that took time; the devising of the interrupting mechanism; and the truing-up of the mirrors.

  Then it became evident that there was more. There were several hundred doorways centered on the axis of Venus Equilateral that must be opened, the space cleared of packing cases, supplies; and in a few cases machinery had to be partially dismantled to clear the way. A good portion of Venus Equilateral’s personnel of three thousand were taken off their jobs, haled out of bed for the emergency, or made to work through their play period, depending upon which shift they worked.

  The machinery could be replaced, the central storage places could be refilled, and the many doors closed again. But the central room containing the air plant was no small matter. Channing took a sad look at the lush growth of Martian sawgrass and sighed. It was growing nicely now, they had nurtured it into lusty growth from mere sprouts in trays, and it was as valuable—precisely—as the lives of the three thousand-odd that lived, loved, and pursued happiness on Venus Equilateral. It was a youthful plant, a replacement brought in a tearing hurry from Mars to replace the former plant that was heaved out by the well-meaning Burbank.

  Channing closed his eyes and shuddered in mock horror. “Chop out the center,” he said.

  The “center” meant the topmost fronds of the long blades; their roots were embedded in the trays that filled the cylindrical floor. Some of the blades would die—Martian sawgrass is tender in spite of the wicked spines that line the edge—but this was an emergency with a capital “E.”

  Cleaning the centermost channel out of the station was no small job. The men who put up Venus Equilateral had no idea that someone would be using the station for a sighting tube some day. The many additions to the station through the years made the layout as regular and as well-planned as the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.

  So for hour upon hour, men swarmed in the central, weightless channel and wielded acetylene torches, cutting steel. Not in all cases, but there were many. In three miles of storage rooms, a lot of doors and bulkheads can be thrown up without crowding the size of the individual rooms.

  Channing spoke into the microphone at the north end of Venus Equilateral, and said: “Walt? We’ve got a sight. Can you see?”

  “Yep,” said Walt. “And say, what happens to me after that bum guess?”

  “That was quite a stretch, Walt. That ‘couple of hours, God willing,’ worked itself into four hours, God help us.”

  “O.K., so I was optimistic. I thought that those doors were all on the center line.”

  “They are supposed to be, but they aren’t huge, and a little misalignment can do a lot of light-stopping. Can we juggle mirrors now?”

  “Sure as shooting. Freddie in the flitter?”

  “Yep. He thinks he’s at the right distance now. But he’s got a light outfit, and this radar can be calibrated to the foot. Is the mirror-dingbat running?”

  “We’re cooking with glass right now.”

  “Brother,” groaned dimming, “if I had one of those death rays that the boys were crowing about back in the days before space hopping became anything but a bit of fiction, I’d scorch your ears—or burn ‘em off—or blow holes in you—or disintegrate you—depending on what stories you read. I haven’t heard such a lousy pun in seventeen years! Hey, Freddie, you’re a little close. Run out a couple of miles, huh? And Walt, I’ve heard some doozies.”

  There was a click in the phones and a cheerful voice chimed in with: “Good morning, fellows. What’s with the Great Quest?”

  Channing answered. “Hi, babe, been snoozing?”

  “Sure, as any sensible person would. Have you been up all the time?”

  “Yeah. We’re still up against the main trouble with telephones—the big trouble, same as back in 1877—our friends have no telephone! You’d be surprised how elusive a spaceship can be in the deep. Sort of a nonexistent, microscopic speck, floating in absolutely nothing. We have a good idea of where they should be, and possibly why and what—but we’re really playing with blindfolds, handcuffs, earplugs, mufflers, nose clamps, and tongue-ties. I am reminded—Hey, Freddie, about three more hundred yards—of the two blind men.”

  “Never mind the blind men,” came back the pilot. “How’m I doing?”

  “Fine. Slide out another hundred yards and hold her there.”

  “Who—me? Listen, Dr. Channing, you’re the bird on the tape line. You have no idea just how insignificant you look from fifty-odd thousand miles away. Put a red-hot on the ‘finders and have ‘im tell me where the ship sits.”

  “O.K., Freddie, you’re on the beam and I’ll put a guy on here to give you the dope. Right?”

  “Right!”

  “Right,” echoed Arden breaking in on the phone. “And I’m going to bring you a slug of coffee and a roll. Or did you remember to eat recently?”

  “We didn’t,” chimed in Walt. “You get your own girl,” snorted Channing. “And besides, you are needed up here. We’ve got work to do.”

  Once again the signal lashed out. The invisible waves drove out and began their swift rush across the void. Time, as it always did during the waiting periods, hung like a Sword of Damocles. The half-hour finally ticked away, and Freddie called in: “No dice. She’s as silent as the grave.”

  Minutes added together into an hour. The concentric wave left the reflector and just dropped out of sight.

  “Too bad you can’t widen her out,” suggested Don.

  “I’d like to tighten it down,” Walt objected. “I think we’re losing power and we can’t increase the power—but we could tighten the beam.”

  “Too bad you can’t wave it back and forth like a fireman squirting water on a lawn,” said Arden.

  “Firemen don’t water lawns—” Walt Franks began, but he was interrupted by a wild yell from Channing.

  “Something hurt?” asked Arden.

  “No, Walt, we can wave the beam.”

  “Until we find ‘em? We’ve been trying that. No worky.”

  Freddie called in excitedly: “Something went by just now and I don’t think it was Christmas!”

  “We might have hit ‘em a dozen times in the last ten minutes and we’ll never know it,” said Channing. “But the spaceliner can be caught. Let’s shoot at it like popping ducks. Shotgun effect. Look, Walt, we can electronically dance the beam at a high rate of speed, spraying the neighborhood. Freddie can hear us return, because we have to hit it all the time and the waver coming on the way back will pass through his position again and again. We’ll set up director elements in the reflector, distorting the electrical surface of the parabolic reflector. That’ll divert the beam. By making the phases swing right, we can scan the vicinity of the Empress of Kolain like a flying spot television camera.”

  Walt turned to one of the technicians and explained. The man nodded. He left Franks’ laboratory and Walt turned back to his friends.

  “Here shoots another couple of hours. I, for one, am going to grab forty winks.”

  Jimmy, the beam-control man, sat down and lighted a cigarette. Freddie let his flitter coast free. And the generators that fed the powerful transmitter came whining to a stop. But there was no sleep for Don and Walt. They kept awake to supervise the work, and to help in hooking up the phase-splitting circuit that would throw out-of-phase radio frequency into the director elements to swing the beam.

  Then once again the circuits were set up. Freddie found the position again and began to hold it. The beam hurled out again, and as the phase shift passed from element to element, the beam swept through an infinitesimal arc that covered thousands of miles of space by the time the bea
m reached the position occupied by the Empress of Kolain.

  Like a painter, the beam painted in a swipe a few hundred miles wide and swept back and forth, each sweep progressing ahead of the stripe before by less than its width. It reached the end of its arbitrary wall and swept back to the beginning again, covering space as before. Here was no slow, irregular swing of mechanical reflector; this was the electronically controlled wavering of a table antenna.

  And this time the half-hour passed slowly but not uneventfully. Right on the tick of the instant, Freddie called back: “Got ‘em!”

  It was a weakling beam that came back in staccato surges. A fading, wavering, spotty signal that threatened to lie down on the job and sleep. It came and it went, often gone for seconds and never strong for so much as a minute. It vied, and almost lost completely, with the constant crackle of cosmic static. It fought with the energies of the Sun’s corona and was more than once the underdog. Had this returning beam carried intelligence of any sort, it would have been wasted. About all that could be carried on a beam as sorry as this was the knowledge that there was a transmitter—and that it was transmitting.

  But its raucous note synchronized with the paintbrush swiping of the transmitter. There was no doubt.

  -

  Don Channing put an arm around Arden’s waist and grinned at Walt Franks. “Go to work, genius. I’ve got the Empress of Kolain on the pipe. You’re the bright-eyed lad that is going to wake them up! We’ve shot almost twenty hours of our allotted fifty. Make with the megacycles, Walter. Arden and I will take in a steak, a moora pitcher, and maybe a bit of woo. Like?” he asked the girl.

  “I like,” she answered.

  Walt Franks smiled and stretched lazily. He made no move to the transmitter. “Don’t go away,” he cautioned them. “Better call up Joe and order beer and sandwiches for the boys in the back room. On you!”

  “Make with the signals first,” said Channing. “And lay off the potables until we finish this silly job.”