Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC

by George O. Smith

  Walt took the introduction in his stride and offered Christine his chair. Arden stuck her tongue out at him, but Walt shrugged it off. Channing shook hands with Jim Baler and men sought the ‘S’ drawer of his file cabinet. He found the Scotch and soda, and then grinned.

  “Should have the ice under ‘I’ but it’s sort of perishable, and so we keep it in the refrigerator. Arden, breach the ‘G’ drawer, please, and haul out the glasses. I suppose we could refrigerate the whole cabinet, but it wouldn’t sound right if people heard that we kept their mail on ice. We‘ll—”

  “Here’s how, if we don’t already know,” said Walt, clinking glasses with Christine.

  “Walt earned that wolf title honestly,” laughed Arden, “he likes to think. Frankly, he’s a sheep in wolfs clothing!”

  “What are his other attributes?” asked Christine.

  “He invents. He scribbles a bit. He cuts doodles on tablecloths, and he manages to get in the way an the time,” said Don. “We keep nun around the place for his entertainment value.”

  “Why—”

  “Quiet, Walter, or I shall explain the sordid details of the Walter Franks Electron Gun.”

  “What was that one?” asked Christine. “You really wouldn’t want to know,” Walt told her.

  “Oh, but I would.”

  “Yeah,” growled Franks, “you would!”

  “Would you rather hear it from him or me?” Arden asked.

  “He’ll tell me,” said Christine. Her voice was positive and assured.

  “And that’ll take care of mat,” said Arden. “But I think we interrupted something. What were you saying about gaining, Walt?”

  “Oh, I was saying that I was tinkering around with the Anopheles. We hooked it up with the solar beam for power, and I got to wondering about that discrepancy. The faster you go, the greater is the angular displacement, and then with some measurements, I came up with a bugger factor—”

  “Whoa, goodness,” laughed Christine. “What is a bugger factor?”

  “You’ll learn,” said Arden, “that the boys out here have a language all their own, I’ve heard them use that one before. The bugger factor is a sort of multiplying, or dividing, or additive, or subtractive quantity. You perform the mathematical operation with the bugger factor, and your original wrong answer turns into the right answer.”

  “Is it accepted?”

  “Oh, sure,” Arden answered. “People don’t realize it, but that string of 4’s in the derivation of Bode’s Law is a bugger factor.”

  “You,” Christine said to Walt, “will also tell me what Bode’s Law is—but later.”

  “O.K.,” grinned Walt. “At any rate, I came up with a bugger factor that gave me to think. The darned solar beam points to where Sol actually is!”

  “Whoosh!” exclaimed Channing. “You don’t suppose we’re tinkering with the medium that propagates the law of gravity?”

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t know. Has anyone ever tried to measure the velocity of propagation of the attraction of gravity?”

  “No, and no one will until we find some way of modulating it.”

  Jim Baler smiled. “No wonder Barney was a little wacky when he got home. I come out here to take a look around and maybe give a lift to your gang on the transmission tube—and bump right into a discussion on the possibility of modulating the law of gravity!”

  “Not the law, Jim, just the force.”

  “Now he gets technical about it. You started out a couple of months ago to detect driver radiation, and ended up by inventing a beam that draws power out of the sun. Think you’ll ever find the driver radiation?”

  “Probably.”

  “Yeah,” drawled Arden. “And I’ll bet my hat that when they do, they won’t have any use for it I’ve seen ‘em work before.”

  “Incidentally,” said Christine, “you mentioned the Anopheles, and I think that is the first ship I’ve ever heard of that hasn’t a feminine name. How come?”

  “The mosquito that does the damage is the female.” Jim grinned. “The Mojave spaceyards owns a sort of tender craft. It has a couple of big cranes on the top and a whole assortment of girders near the bottom. It looks like, and is also called the Praying Mantis. Those are also female; at least the ones that aren’t afraid of their own shadow are.”

  Channing said suddenly: “Walt, have you tried the propagation time of the solar beam on the Anopheles!”

  “No. How would we go about doing that?”

  “By leaving the controls set for one G, and then starting the ship by swapping the tube energizing voltages from test power to operating power.”

  “Should that tell us?”

  “Sure. As we know, the amount of energy radiated from the sun upon a spot the size of our solar tube is a matter of peanuts compared to the stuff we must get out of it. Ergo, our beam must go to Sol and collect the power and draw it back down the beam. Measure the transit time, and we’ll know.”

  “That’s an idea. I’ve got a micro clock in the lab. We can measure it to a hundredth millionth of a second. Anyone like to get shook up?”

  “How?” asked Jim.

  “Snapping from zero to one G all at once-like isn’t too gentle. She’ll knock your eyes out.”

  “Sounds like fun. I’m elected.”

  “So am I,” insisted Christine.

  “No,” said Jim. “I know what he’s talking about.”

  “So do I,” said Arden. “Don’t do it.”

  “Well, what better have you to offer?” asked Christine unhappily.

  “You and I are going down to the Mall.”

  Channing groaned in mock anguish. “Here comes another closetful of female haberdashery. I’m going to close that corridor someday, or put a ceiling on the quantity of sales, or make it illegal to sell a woman anything unless she can prove that ‘she has nothing to wear’!”

  “That, I’d like to see,” said Walt.

  “You would,” Arden snorted. “Come on, Chris. Better than the best of three worlds is available.”

  “That sort of leaves me all alone,” said Don. “I’m going to look up Wes Farrell and see if he’s been able to make anything worth looking at for a driving detector.”

  -

  Don found Wes in the laboratory, poring over a complicated circuit. Farrell was muttering under his breath, and probing deep into the maze of haywire on the bench.

  “Wes, when you get to talking to yourself, it’s time to take a jaunt to Joe’s.”

  “Not right now,” Wes objected. “I haven’t got that hollow leg that your gang seemed to have developed. Besides, I’m on the trail of something.”

  “Yes?” Channing forgot about Joe’s, and was all interest.

  “I got a wiggle out of the meter there a few minutes ago. I’m trying to get another one.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Wavered up and down like fierce for about a minute after I turned it on. Then it died quick, and has been dead ever since.”

  “Could it have been anything cockeyed with the instruments?”

  “Nope. I’ve checked every part in this circuit, and everything is as good as it ever will be. No, something external caused that response.”

  “You’ve tried the solar tube with a dynode of the same alloy as the driver cathodes?”

  “Uh-huh. Nothing at all. Oh, I’ll take that back. I got a scratch. With a pre-meter gain of about four hundred decibels, I read three micro-microamperes. That was detected from a driver tube forty feet across the room, running at full blast I wondered for a minute whether the opposing driver was doing any cancellation, and so I took a chance and killed it for about a half-second, but that wasn’t it.”

  “Nuts. Does the stuff attenuate with distance?”

  “As best as I could measure, it was something to the tune of inversely proportional to the cube of the distance. That’s not normal for beams, since it shows that the stuff isn’t globularly radiated. But the amplifier gain was hanging right on the li
mit of possible amplification, and the meter was as sensitive as a meter can be made, I think. You couldn’t talk from one end of Venus Equilateral to the other with a set like that.”

  “No, I guess you’re right. Hey! Look!”

  The meter took a sudden upswing, danced for a minute, and died once more.

  “What have you got in there? What did you change?”

  “Oh, I got foolish and tried a tuned circuit across the output of one of the miniature transmission tubes. It’s far enough away from the big beams and stuff at the north end, so that none of the leakage can cause trouble. Besides, I’m not getting anything like our beam transmissions.”

  Channing laughed. “Uh-huh, looks to me like you’re not getting much of anything at all.”

  Farrell smiled wryly. “Yeah, that’s so,” he agreed. “But look, Don, Hertz himself didn’t collect a transcontinental shortwave broadcast on his first attempt.”

  “If Hertz had been forced to rely upon vacuum tubes, his theories couldn’t have been formulated, I think,” said Channing. “At least, not by him. The easier frequencies and wavelengths are too long; a five-hundred-meter dipole can’t be set up in a small room far laboratory tinkering. The kind of frequencies that come of dipoles a couple of feet long, such as Hertz used, are pretty hard to work with unless you have special tubes.”

  “Hertz had rotten detectors, too. But he made his experiments with spark gap generators, which gave sufficient high-peak transcients to induce spark-magnitude voltages in his receiving dipole.”

  “I’m not too sure of that tuned-circuit idea of yours, Wes. Go ahead and tinker to your heart’s content, but remember that I’m skeptical of the standard resonance idea.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’ve been tinkering with driver tubes for years and years—and we have also been gadgeting up detectors, radio hootnannies, and stuff of the electronic spectrum all the way from direct current to hard X-rays, and we have yet to have anything react to driver radiation. Ergo, I’m skeptical.”

  The call bell rang for Channing, and he answered. It was Walt Franks.

  “Don,” he said with a laugh in his voice, though it was apparent that he felt slightly guilty about laughing, “got a ‘gram from Addison, the project engineer on the solar beam from Terran Electric. Says:

  -

  FINALLY GOT THROUGH CHANNING LAYER. POWER BY THE MEGAWATT HOUR IN GREAT SHAPE. BUT THE ATMOSPHERE FROM THE CHANNING LAYER RIGHT DOWN TO THE SNOUT OF THE TUBE IS A DULL RED SCINTILLATION. LIKE THE DRIVER TUBE TRAIL—IT IONIZES THE ATMOSPHERE INTO OZONE. POWER BY THE MEGAWATT, AND OZONE BY THE MEGATON.

  -

  “Ozone, hey? Lots of it?”

  “Plenty, according to the rest of this. It looks to me like a sort of ‘denatured’ power system. There it is, all nice and potent, cheap, and unlicensed. But the second swallow going down meets the first one on the way back. Power they got—but the ozone they can’t take. It’s poisonous like a nice dose of chlorine. Poor Terran Electric!”

  Mark Kingman sat in the control room of a ship of space and worried. Below the dome, Venus covered three-quarters of the sky, and it circled slowly as the Terran Electric ship oscillated gently up and down.

  Before Kingman, on the desk, were pages of stock market reports. On a blackboard, a jagged line denoted the vacillation of Venus Equilateral, Preferred. This phase of his plan was working to perfection. Gradually, he was buying share after share out of uninterested hands by his depredations. Soon he would have enough stock to stage a grand show, and men he could swing the thing his way.

  His worry was not with this affair.

  He gloated over that. His belief that he could beat this Venus Equilateral crowd if he fought them on his ground with his weapon was being corroborated. That, plus the fact that he was using some of Venus Equilateral’s own thunder to do the job, was giving him to think that it was but a matter of time.

  And the poor fools were not aware of their peril. Oh, some bird was trying to buck him, but he was not prepared as Kingman was, nor had he the source of information that Kingman had.

  No, the thing that worried him was—

  And there it came again. A wild, cacophonous wailing, like a whole orchestra of instruments playing at random, in random keys. It shook the very roots of the body, that terrible caterwauling, and not only did h shake the body, and the mind, but it actually caused loose plates to rattle in the bulkhead, and the cabinet doors followed in unison. The diapason stop was out for noon, and the racket filled the small control room and bounced back and form, dinning at the ears of Kingman as it went by. It penetrated to the upper reaches of the ship, and the crew gritted their teeth and cursed the necessity of being able to hear orders, for cotton plugs would have been a godsend and a curse simultaneously. Anything that would blot that racket out would also deafen them to the vital orders necessary to the operation of the ship in this precarious poising maneuver.

  Two hundred sheer watts of undistorted audio power boomed forth in that tiny room—two hundred watts of pure, undistorted power to racket forth something that probably started out as sheer distortion.

  And yet—

  Faintly striving against that fearful racket there came a piping, flat-sounding human voice that said: “Kingman! VE Preferred, just hit eighty-nine!”

  Kingman scowled and punched on the intership teletype machine. Using the communicator set with that racket would have been impossible.

  The radio man read the note that appeared on his ‘type, and smiled grimly. He saw to his helio-mirror and sighted through a fine telescope at a spot on Venus, three thousand miles below. The helio began to send its flashing signal to this isolated spot near the Boiling River, and it was read, acknowledged, and repeated for safety’s sake. The radio man flashed “O.K.” and went back to his forty-seventh game of chess with the assistant pilot.

  The helio man on the Boiling River read the message, grinned, and stepped to the telephone. He called a number at Northern Landing, and a tight beam sped across the northern quarter of Venus to a man connected with the Venus Stock Market. The man nodded, and said to another: “Buy fifteen hundred—use the name of Ralph Gantry this time.”

  The stock purchased under the name of Ralph Gantry was signed, sealed, and delivered exactly fifteen minutes before the ticker projection on the grand wall of the exchange showed the VE, Preferred, stock turn the bottom curve and start upward by hitting eighty-nine!

  Back in the Terran Electric spaceship Kingman’s ears were still beset by the roaring, alien music.

  He was sitting in his chair with his head between his hands, and did not see the man approaching the instrument panel with a pair of side cutters in one hand. The man reached the panel, lifted it slightly, and reached forward. Then Kingman, hearing a slight imperfection in the wail of the speaker, looked up, jumped from his chair, and tackled the engineer.

  “You blasted fool!” blazed Kingman. “You idiot!”

  The music stopped at his third word, and the scream of his voice in the silence of the room almost scared Kingman himself.

  “Mark, I’m going nuts. I can’t stand that racket.”

  “You’re going to stand it. Unless you can get something to cut it out.”

  “I can’t. I’m not brilliant enough to devise a circuit that will cut that noise and still permit the entry of your fellow on Luna.”

  “Then you’ll live with it.”

  “Mark, why can’t we take that relay apart and work on it?”

  “Ben, as far as I know, that relay is what Channing and his gang would give their whole station for—and will, soon enough. I don’t care how it works—or why!”

  “That’s no way to make progress,” Ben objected.

  “Yeah, but we’ve got the only detector for driver radiation in this part of the universe! I’m not going to have it wrecked by a screwball engineer who doesn’t give a care what’s going on as long as he can tinker with something new and different. What do we know about it? Nothing. Therefo
re how can you learn anything about it? What would you look for? What would you expect to find?”

  “But where is that music coming from?”

  “I don’t know. As best as we can calculate, driver radiation propagates at the square of the speed of light, and that gives us a twenty-four minute edge on Venus Equilateral at the present time. For all I know, that music may be coming from the other end of the galaxy. At the square of the speed of light, you could talk to Centauri and get an answer in not too long.”

  “But if we had a chance to tinker with that relay,” Ben said, “we might be able to find out what tunes it, and then we can tune in the Lunar station and tune out that cat-melody.”

  “I’m running this show—and this relay is going to stay right where it is. I don’t care a hoot about the control circuit it breaks; these controls are set, somehow, so that we can detect driver radiations, and I’m not taking any chances of having it ruined.”

  “Can’t you rum the gain down, at least?”

  “Nope. We’d miss the gang at Luna.”

  The speaker spoke in that faint, flat-toned human voice again. It was easy to see that all that gain was necessary to back up the obviously faint response of Kingman’s detector. The speaker said: “Kingman! Addison got power through the Channing Layer!”

  That was all for about an hour. Meanwhile, the mewling tones burst forth again and again, assaulting the ears with intent to do damage. The messages were terse and for the most part uninteresting. They gave the market reports; they intercepted the beam transmissions through the Terran Heaviside Layer before they got through the Lunar Relay Station, inspected the swiftly moving tape, and transmitted the juicy morsels to Kingman via the big driver tube that stood poised outside of the landed spaceship.

  Kingman enjoyed an hour of celebration at Addison’s success, and then the joy turned to bitter hate as the message came through telling of the ozone that resulted in the passage of the solar beam through the atmosphere. The success of the beam, and the utter impossibility of using it, were far worse than the original fact of the beam’s failure to pass the Channing Layer.