Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC

by George O. Smith

  “Well, to work, people. We’ve got a job to do in the next three and a half days.”

  -

  Those days were filled with activity. Hauling the heavy parts down to the turret was no small job, but it was accomplished after a lot of hard work and quite a bit of tinkering with a cutting torch. The parts were installed in the outer skin, and the crew with the torch went back over the trail and replaced the gaping holes they left in the walls and floors of Venus Equilateral. The engineering department went to work, and for some hours the place was silent save for the clash of pencil on paper and the scratching of scalps. The most popular book in the station became a volume on nuclear physics, and the second most popular book was a table of integrals. The stenographic force went to work combing the library for information pertaining to electronic velocities, and a junior engineer was placed in as buffer between the eager stenographers and the harried engineering department. This was necessary because the stenographers got to the point where they would send anything at all that said either “electrons” or “velocity,” and one of the engineers read halfway through a text on atomic structure before he realized that he had been sold a bill of goods. Wire went by the mile down to the turret, and men proceeded to blow out half of the meters in the station with the high-powered beam. Luckily, the thing was completely nonspectacular, or Murdoch might have gained an inkling of their activities. The working crew manipulated constants and made haywire circuits, and finally announced that the beam would deflect—if the calculations were correct.

  “They’d better be,” said Channing. He was weary. His eyes were puffed from lack of sleep, and he hadn’t had his clothing off in three days.

  “They are,” said Franks. He was in no better shape than Don.

  “They’d better be right,” said Channing ominously. “We’re asking for a kick in the teeth. The first bundle of stuff that leaves our gun will energize Murdoch’s meteor spotter by sheer electrostatic force. His gun mounts, which you tell me are coupled to the meteor detector for aiming, will swivel to cover the turret out here. Then he’ll let us have it right in the betatron. If we don’t get him first, he’ll get us second.”

  “Don,” said Walt in a worried voice, “how are we going to replace the charge on the station? Like the bird who was tossing baseballs out of the train—he quit when he ran out of them. Our gun will quit cold when we run out of electrons—or when the positive charge gets so high that the betatron can’t overcome the electrostatic attraction.”

  “Venus Equilateral is a free grid,” smiled Channing. “As soon as we shoot off electrons, Old Sol becomes a hot cathode and our station collects ‘em until the charge is equalized again.”

  “And what is happening to the bird who is holding on to something when we make off with a million volts? Does he scrape himself off the opposite wall in a week or so—after he comes to—or can we use him for freezing ice cubes? Seems to me that it might be a little bit fatal.”

  “Didn’t think of that,” Channing said. “There’s one thing: their personal charge doesn’t add up to a large quantity of electricity. If we insulate ‘em and put ‘em in their spacesuits, they’ll be all right as long as they don’t try to grab anything. They’ll be on the up and down for a bit, but the resistance of the spacesuit is high enough to keep ‘em from draining out all their electrons at once. I recall the experiments with early Van de Graaff generators at a few million volts—the operator used to sit in the charged sphere because it was one place where he couldn’t be hit by man-made lightning. It’ll be rough, but it won’t kill us. Spacesuits, and have ‘em sit in plastic chairs, the feet of which are insulated from the floor by china dinner plates. This plastic wall covering that we have in the apartments is a blessing. If it were all bare steel, every room would be a miniature Hell. Issue general instructions to that effect. We’ve been having emergency drills for a long time; now’s the time to use the grand collection of elastomer spacesuits. Tell ‘em we give ‘em an hour to get ready.”

  -

  Hellion Murdoch’s voice came over the radio at exactly the second of the expiration of his limit. He called Channing and said;

  “What is your answer, Dr. Channing?”

  Don squinted down the pilot tube of the meteor spotter and saw the Hippocrates passing. It was gone before he spoke, but the second ship came along, and the pilot tube leaped into line with it. Don checked meters on the crude panel before him, and then pressed the plastic handle of a long lever.

  There was the crash of heavy-duty oil switch.

  Crackles of electricity flashed back and forth through the station, and the smell of ozone arose. Electric-light filaments leaned over crazily, trying to touch the inner walls of the glass. Panes of glass ran blue for an instant, and the nap of the carpets throughout the station stood bolt upright. Hair stood on end, touched the plastic helmet dome, discharged, fell to the scalp, raised again and discharged, fell once more, and then repeated this raising and falling, again and again and again. Electric clocks ran crazily, and every bit of electronic equipment on the station began to act in an unpredictable manner.

  Then things settled down again as the solar emission charged that station to equilibrium.

  Aboard the ship, it was another story. The celestial globe of the meteor spotter blazed once in a blinding light and then went completely out of control. It danced with pinpoints of light, and the coupler that was used to direct the guns went crazy. Turrets tried to swivel, but the charge raised hob with the electronic controls, and the guns raised once, and then fell, inert. One of them belched flame, and the shell went wild. The carefully balanced potentials in the driver tubes were upset, and the ship lost headway. The heavy ion stream from the driving cathode bent and spread, touching the dynodes in the tubes. The resulting current brought them to a red heat, and they melted down and floated through the evacuated tube in round droplets. Instruments went wild, and gave every possible answer, and the ship became a bedlam of ringing bells and flashing danger lights.

  But the crew was in no shape to appreciate this display. From metal parts in the ship there appeared coronas that reached for the unprotected men, and seared their flesh. And since their gravity-apparent was gone, they floated freely through the air, and came in contact with highly charged walls, ceilings, and floors; to say nothing of the standard metal furniture.

  It was a sorry bunch of pirates that found themselves in a ship-without-motive-power that was beginning to leave their circular course on a tangent which would let them drop into the Sun.

  “That’s my answer, Murdoch!” snapped Channing. “Watch your second ship!”

  “You young devil!” snarled Murdoch. “What did you do?”

  “You never thought that it would be an electronics engineer that made the first energy gun, did you, Murdoch? I’m now going to take a shot at No. 3!”

  No. 3’s turret swiveled around and from the guns flashes of fire came streaming. Channing punched his lever savagely, and once again the station was tortured by the effects of its own offensive.

  Ship No. 3 suffered the same fate as No. 2.

  Then, seconds later, armor-piercing shells began to hit Venus Equilateral. They hit, and because of the terrific charge, they began to arc at the noses. The terrible current passed through the fuses, and the shells exploded on contact instead of boring in before detonation. Metal was bent and burned, but only a few tiny holes resulted. As the charge on the station approached equilibrium once more, men ran with torches to seal these holes.

  “Murdoch,” said Channing, “I want you!”

  “Come and get me!”

  “Land—or die!” Channing snapped in a vicious tone. “I’m no humanitarian, Murdoch. You’d be better off dead!”

  “Never!” said Hellion Murdoch.

  Channing pulled the lever for the third time, but as he did, Murdoch’s ship leaped forward under several G. The magnets could not change in field soon enough to compensate for this change in direction, and the charge failed to
connect as a bull’s-eye. It did expend some of its energy on the tail of the ship. Not enough to cripple the Hippocrates, but the vessel took on a charge of enough value to make things hard on the crew.

  Metal sparked, and instruments went mad. Meters wound their needles around the end pegs. The celestial globe glinted in a riot of color and then went completely dead. Gun servers dropped their projectiles as they became too heavily charged to handle, and they rolled across the turret floors, creating panic in the gun crews. The pilot fought the controls, but the charge on his driver tubes was sufficient to make his helm completely unpredictable. The panel sparked at him and seared his hands, spoiling his nervous control and making him heavy-handed.

  “Murdoch,” cried Channing in a hearty voice, “that was a miss! Want a hit?”

  Murdoch’s radio was completely dead. His ship was yawing from side to side as the static charges raced through the driver tubes. The pilot gained control after a fashion, and decided that he had taken enough. He circled the station warily and began to make a shaky landing at the south end.

  Channing saw him coming, and with a glint in his eye, he pressed the lever for the fourth and last time.

  Murdoch’s ship touched the landing stage just after the charge had been driven out into space. The heavy negative charge on the Hippocrates met the heavy positive charge on Venus Equilateral. The ship touched, and from that contact, there arose a cloud of incandescent gas. The entire charge left the ship at once, and through that single contact.

  When the cloud dissipated, the contact was a crude but efficient welded joint that was gleaming white-hot Channing said to Walt: “That’s going to be messy.”

  Inside the Hippocrates, men were frozen to their handholds. It was messy, and cleaning up the Hippocrates was a job not relished by those who did it.

  But cleaning up Venus Equilateral was no small matter, either.

  A week went by before the snarled-up instruments were repaired. A week in which the captured Hippocrates was repaired, too, and used to transport prisoners to and material and special supplies from Terra, and Venus, and Mars. A week in which the service from planet to planet was erratic.

  Then service was restored, and life settled down to a reasonable level. It was after this that Walt and Don found time to spend an idle hour together.

  Walt raised his glass and said: “Here’s to electrons!”

  “Yeah,” grinned Channing, “here’s to electrons. Y’know, Walt, I was a little afraid that space might become a sort of Wild West show, with the ships bristling with space guns and betatrons and stuff like that. In which case you’d have been a stinking benefactor. But if the recoil is as bad as the output—and Newton said that it must be—I can’t see ships cluttering up their insides with stuff that’ll screw up their instruments and driver tubes. But the thing that amuses me about the whole thing is the total failure you produced.”

  “Failure?” asked Walt. “What failed?”

  “Don’t you know? Have you forgotten? Do you realize that spaceships are still ducking around meteors instead of blasting them out of the way with the Franks Electron Gun? Or did you lose sight of the fact that this dingbat started out in life as a meteor-sweeper?”

  Walt glared over the rim of his glass, but he had nothing to say.

  -

  Interlude

  Once the threat of piracy was over, Don Channing returned to his major problem: how to devise two-way communication between ship and planet, or better, from ship to ship. It was not to come easily.

  But it is not hard to come to the mistaken conclusion that nothing much was taking place outside of Venus Equilateral, and that all of the science of communication was centered there. The truth is different. For, uncounted centuries earlier, on the now-arid plains of Mars, a highly civilized culture developed sophisticated equipment and then died away, leaving some of its gear to be puzzled over, not by engineers, but by archaeologists …

  -

  Lost Art

  Sargon of Akkad was holding court in all of his splendor in Mesopotamia, which he thought to be the center of the universe. The stars to him were but holes in a black bowl which he called the sky. They were beautiful then, as they are now, but he thought that they were put there for his edification only; for was he not the ruler of Akkadia? After Sargon of Akkad, there would come forty-odd centuries of climbing before men reached the stars and found not only that there had been men upon them, but that a civilization on Mars had reached its peak four thousand years before Christ and was now but a memory and a wealth of pictographs that adorned the semi-preserved temples of Canalopsis.

  And forty-odd centuries after, the men of Terra wondered about the ideographs and solved them sufficiently to piece together the wonders of the long-dead Martian civilization.

  Sargon of Akkad did not know that the stars that he beheld carried on them wonders his mind would not, could not, accept.

  -

  Altas, the Martian, smiled tolerantly at his son. The young man boasted on until Altas said: “So you have memorized the contents of my manual? Good, Than, for I am growing old and I would be pleased to have my son fill my shoes. Come into the workshop that I may pass upon your proficiency.”

  Altas led Than to the laboratory that stood at the foot of the great tower of steel; Altas removed from a cabinet a replacement element from the great beam above their heads, and said: “Than, show me how to hook this up!”

  Than’s eyes glowed. From other cabinets he took small auxiliary parts. From hooks upon the wall, he took lengths of wire. Working with a brilliant deftness that was his heritage as a Martian, Than spent an hour attaching the complicated circuits. After he was finished, Than stepped back and said: “There—and believe it or not, this is the first time you have permitted me to work with one of the beam elements.”

  “You have done well,” said Altas with that same cryptic smile. “But now we shall see. The main question is: does it work?”

  “Naturally,” answered Than in youthful pride. “Is it not hooked up exactly as your manual says? It will work.”

  “We shall see,” repeated Altas. “We shall see.”

  -

  Barney Carroll and James Baler cut through the thin air of Mars in a driver-wing flier at a terrific rate of speed. It was the only kind of flier that would work on Mars with any degree of safety, since it depended upon the support of its drivers rather than the wing surface. They were hitting it up at almost a thousand miles per hour on their way from Canalopsis to Lincoln Head; their trip would take an hour and a half.

  As they passed over the red sand of Mars, endlessly it seemed, a glint of metal caught Barney’s eye, and he shouted.

  “What’s the matter, Barney?” asked Jim.

  “Roll her over and run back a mile or so,” said Barney. “I saw something down there that didn’t belong in this desert.”

  Jim snapped the plane around in a sharp loop that nearly took their heads off, and they ran back along their course.

  “Yep,” Barney called, “there she is!”

  “What?”

  “See that glint of shiny metal? That doesn’t belong in this mess of erosion. Might be a crash.”

  “Hold tight.” Jim laughed. “We’re going down.”

  They did. Jim’s piloting had all the aspects of a dare-devil racing pilot’s, and Barney was used to it. Jim snapped the nose of the little flier down and they power-dived to within a few yards of the sand before he set the plane on its tail and skidded flatwise to kill speed. He leveled off, and the flier came screaming in for a perfect landing not many feet from the glinting object.

  “This is no crash,” said Baler. “This looks like the remains of an air-lane beacon of some sort.”

  “Does it? Not like any I’ve seen. It reminds me more of some of the gadgets they find here and there—the remnants of the Ancients. They used to build junk like this.”

  “Hook up the sand-blower,” Baler suggested. “We’ll clear some of this rubble away and see what
she really looks like. Can’t see much more than what looks like a high-powered searchlight.”

  Barney hauled equipment out of the flier and hitched it to a small motor in the plane. The blower created a small storm for an hour or so, its blast directed by the suitclad archaeologist. Working with experience gained in uncovering the remains of a dozen dead and buried cities, Barney cleared the shifting sand from the remains of the tower.

  The head was there, preserved by the dry sand. Thirty feet below the platform, the slender tower was broken off. No delving could find the lower portion.

  “This is quite a find,” said Jim. “Looks like some of the carvings on the Temple of Science at Canalopsis—that little house on the top of the spire with the three-foot runway around it; then this dingbat perched on top of the roof. Never did figure out what it was for.”

  “We don’t know whether the Martians’ eyes responded as ours do,” suggested Barney. “This might be a searchlight that puts out with Martian-visible spectrum. If they saw with infrared, they wouldn’t be using Terran fluorescent lighting. If they saw with long heat frequencies, they wouldn’t waste power with even a tungsten filament light, but would have invented something that cooked with most of its energy in the visible spectrum, just as we have in the last couple of hundred years.”

  “That’s just a guess, of course.”

  “Naturally,” said Barney. “Here, I’ve got the door cracked. Let’s be the first people in this place for six thousand years Terran. Take it easy, this floor is at an angle of thirty degrees.”

  “I won’t slide. G’wan in. I’m your shadow.”

  They entered the thirty-foot circular room and snapped on their torches. There was a bench that ran almost around the entire room. It was empty save for a few scraps of metal and a Martian book of several hundred metal pages.