Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC

by George O. Smith

  Nothing happened.

  “Run a line from the output back through a voltage-dividing circuit to the in-phase anode,” suggested Walt.

  “How much?”

  “Put a potentiometer in it so we can vary the amount of voltage. After all, Barney Carroll said that the application of voltage in phase with the transmitted power is necessary to the operation of the relay tube, in transmission of DC, it is necessary to jack up the in-phase anode with a bit of DC. That’s in-phase with a vengeance!”

  “What you’re thinking is that whatever this sub-level energy is, some of it should be applied to the in-phase anode?”

  “Nothing but.”

  The cabinet provided a standard potentiometer, and as Don advanced the amount of fed-back voltage, Freddie’s voice came booming in louder and louder. It overloaded the audio amplifier, and they turned the gain down as Channing increased the in-phase voltage more and more. It passed through a peak, and then Don left the potentiometer set for maximum.

  “Wes,” he said, “call Freddie and tell him to take off for Terra, at about four G. Have the gang upstairs hang a ship beam on him so we can follow him with suggestions. Too bad we can’t get there immediately.”

  “What I’m worrying about is the available gain,” said Wes. “That thing may have given us a gain of a couple of thousand, but that isn’t going to be enough. Not for planet-to-planet service.”

  “Later on we may be able to hang a couple of those things in cascade,” Walt suggested.

  “Or if not, I know a trick that will work—one that will enable us to get a gain of several million,” said Don.

  “Yeah? Mirrors, or adding machines? You can’t make an audio amplifier of a three-million gain.”

  “I know it—at least not a practical one. But we can probably use our audio modulator to modulate a radio frequency, and then modulate the driver with the RF. Then we hang a receiver onto the detector gadget here, and collect RF, modulated, just like a standard radio transmission, and amplify it at RF, convert it to IF, and detect it to AF. Catch?”

  “Sure. And that gives me another thought. It might just be possible, if your idea is possible, that we can insert several frequencies of RF into the tube and hang a number of receivers on the detector, here.”

  Arden laughed. “From crystal detection to multiplex transmission in ten easy lessons!”

  “Call Chuck and have him begin to concoct an RF stage for tube modulation,” said Don. “It’ll have to be fairly low—not higher than a couple of megacycles, so that he can handle it with the stuff he has available. But as long as we can hear his dulcet voice chirping that ‘one, two, three, four, test,’ of his, we can also have ship-to-station two-way. We squirt out on the ship beam, and he talks back on the driver transmitter.”

  “That’ll be a help,” observed Wes. “I’d been thinking by habit that we had no way to get word back from the Relay Girl.”

  “So had I,” Walt confessed. “But we’ll get over that.”

  “Meanwhile, I’m going to get this alloy selectivity investigated right down to the last nub,” said Don. “Chuck’s gang can take it from all angles and record their findings. We’ll ultimately be able to devise a system of mathematics for it from their analysis. You won’t mind being bothered every fifteen minutes for the first week, will you, Wes? They’ll be running to you in your steep with questions until they catch up with your present level of ability in this job. Eventually they’ll pass you up, and then you’ll have to study their results in order to keep up.”

  “Suits me. That sounds like my job, anyway.”

  “It is. O.K. Arden, I’m coming now.”

  “It’s about time.” Arden smiled. “I wouldn’t haul you away from your first love excepting that I know you haven’t eaten in eight or nine hours. I’ve got roast knolla.”

  “S’long, fellows,” grinned Channing. “I’m one of the few guys in the inner system who can forget that the knolla is the North Venus brother to a pussycat.”

  “I could feed you pussycat and you’d eat it if I called it knolla,” said Arden. “But you wouldn’t eat knolla if I called it pussycat.”

  “You can’t tell the difference,” said Walt.

  “Tell me,” asked Wes, “what does pussycat taste like?”

  “I mean by visual inspection. Unfortunately, there can be no comparison drawn. The Venusians will eat pussycat, but they look upon the knolla as a household pet, not fit for Venusian consumption. So unless we revive one of the ancient Martians, who may have the intestinal fortitude—better known as guts—to eat both and describe the difference, we may never know,” Walt offered.

  “Stop it,” said Arden, “or you’ll have my dinner spoiled for me.”

  “All the more for me,” said Don. “Now, when I was in college, we cooked the dean’s cat and offered it to some pledges under the name of knolla. They said—”

  “We’ll have macaroni for dinner,” said Arden firmly. “I’ll never be able to look a fried knolla in the pan again without wondering whether it caterwauled on some back fence in Chicago, or a Palanortis whitewood on Venus.”

  She left, and Channing went with her, arguing with her to the effect that she should develop a disregard for things like their discussion. As a matter of interest, Channing had his roast knolla that evening, so he must have convinced Arden.

  Walt said: “And then there were three. Christine, has our little pre-dinner talk disturbed your appetite?”

  “Not in the least,” said the girl stoutly. “I wouldn’t care whether it was knolla or pussycat I’ve been on Mars so long that either one of the little felines is alien to me. What have you to offer?”

  “We’ll hit Joe’s for dinner, which is the best bar in sixty million miles today. Later we may take in the latest celluloid epic, then there will be a bit of mixed wrestling in the ballroom.”

  “Mixed wres—Oh, you mean dancing. Sounds interesting now. Now?”

  “Now. Wes, what are you heading for?”

  “Oh, I’ve got on a cockeyed schedule,” said Wes. “I’ve been catching my sleep at more and more out-of-phase hours until this is not too long after breakfast for me. You birds all speak of ‘Tomorrow’, Today’, and ‘Yesterday’ out here, but this business of having no sun to come up in the morning, and the electric lights running all the time has me all bollixed up.”

  “That daily nomenclature is purely from habit,” said Walt. “As you know, we run three equal shifts of eight hours each, and therefore what may be ‘Morning‘ to Bill is ‘Noon’ to James and ‘Night’ to Harry. It is meaningless, but habitual, to speak of ‘Morning’ when you mean ‘Just after I get up’! Follow me?”

  “Yep. This, then, is morning to me. Run along and have fun.”

  “We’ll try,” said Walt.

  “We will,” said Christine.

  Farrell grinned as they left. He looked at Walt and said: “You will!”

  Walt wondered whether he should have questioned Wes about that remark, but he did not. Several hours later, he wondered how Wes could have been so right.

  Venus Equilateral, Preferred, started in its long climb as soon as the markets opened on the following day. Cartwright, following his orders and his experience, held on to whatever stock he had, and bought whatever stock was tossed his way. Several times he was on the verge of asking Interplanetary Transport for monetary assistance, but the real need never materialized.

  Kingman alternately cursed the whining music and cheered the pyramiding stock. About the only thing that kept Kingman from going completely mad was the fact that the alien music was not continuous, but it came and went in stretches of anything from five to fifty minutes, with varied periods for silence in between selections.

  Up and up it went, and Kingman was seeing the final, victorious coup in the offing. A week more, and Venus Equilateral would belong to Terran Electric. The beam from Terra was silent, save for a few items of interest not connected with the market Kingman’s men were given the latest news, b
aseball scores, and so forth, among which items was another message to Channing from the solar beam project engineer, Addison. They had about given up. Nothing they could do would prevent the formation of ozone by the ton as they drew power by the kilowatt from Sol.

  On Venus Equilateral, Channing said: “Ask Freddie what his radio frequency is.”

  Ten minutes later, at the speed of light, the ship beam reached the Relay Girl and the message clicked out. Freddie read it and spoke into the microphone. The Relay Girl bucked unmercifully, as the voice amplitude made the acceleration change. Then at the speed of light, squared, the answer came back in less than a twinkle.

  “Seventeen hundred kilocycles.”

  Channing began to turn the tuner of the radio receiver. The band was dead, and he laughed. “This is going to be tricky, what with the necessity of aligning both the driver-alloy disk and the radio receiver. Takes time.”

  He changed the alloy disk in minute increments, and waved the tuner across the portion of the band that would most likely cover the experimental error of Freddie Thomas’ frequency measurement. A burst of sound caught his ear, was lost for a moment, and then swelled into perfect tune as Don worked over the double timing system.

  “Whoa, Tillie,” said Walt. “That sounds like—”

  “Like hell!”

  “Right. Just what I was going to say. Is it music?”

  “Could be. I’ve got a slightly tin ear, you know.”

  “Mine is fair,” said Walt, “but it might as well be solid brass as far as this mess is concerned. It’s music of some kind, you can tell it by the rhythm. But the scale isn’t like anything I’ve ever heard before.”

  “Might be a phonograph record played backward,” suggested Wes.

  “I doubt it,” said Channing seriously. “The swell of that orchestra indicates a number of instruments—of some cockeyed kind or other. The point I’m making is that anything of a classical or semiclassical nature played backwards on a phonograph actually sounds passable. I can’t say the same for jamstead music, but it holds for most of the classics, believe it or not. This sounds strictly from hunger.”

  “Or hatred. Maybe the musicians do not like one another.”

  “Then they should lambaste one another with their instruments, not paste the sub-ether with them.”

  Channing lit a cigarette. “Mark the dial,” he said. “Both of ‘em. I’ve got to get in touch with the Thomas boys.”

  Walt marked the dials and tuned for the Relay Girl. He found it coming in not far from the other setting. Chuck was speaking, and they tuned in near the middle of his speech.

  “… this thing so that it will not buck like a scenic railway finding the fourth derivative of space with respect to time. For my non-technical listeners, that is none other than the better-known term: jerkiness. We applied the modulation to the first driver anode—the little circular one right above the cathode. I don’t know whether this is getting out as it should, so I’m going to talk along for the next fifteen minutes straight until I hear from you. Then we’re switching over and repeating. Can you hear me?”

  Channing cut the gain down to a whisper and put a message on the beam, confirming his reception.

  Ten minutes later, Chuck changed his set speech, and said: “Good! Too bad we haven’t got one of those receivers here, or we could make this a two-way with some action. Now listen, Don. My idiot brother says that he can make the beam transmit without the drive. Unfortunately, I am not a drive expert like he is and so I can not remonstrate with the half-wit. So, and right now, we’re cutting the supply voltage to the final focusing anode. Whoops! I just floated off the floor and the mike cable is all tangled up in my feet. This free stuff is not as simple as the old fiction writers claimed it was. Things are floating all over the place like mad. The accelerometer says exactly zero, and so you tell me if we are getting out. We’re going back on one G so that we can sit down again. That’s better! Though the idiot—it’s a shame to be forced to admit that one of your family is half-witted—didn’t wait until we were in position to fall. I almost landed on my head—which is where he was dropped as an infant. How was it? Did you hear my manly voice while we were going free? Say ‘No’ so that my idiot brother will not have anything to say about his brilliant mind. I’m out of breath, and we’re going back home on that home recording of Freddie saying—and I will let him quote, via acetate …”

  The sound of a phonograph pickup being dropped on a record preceded Freddie’s voice, saying: “One, two, three, four, test, one—”

  Channing cut the gain again. “That’s red-hot. I thought he was talking all this time.”

  “Not the Thomas boys. That comes under the classification of ‘Work,’ which they shun unless they cannot get any kind of machine to do it for them,” Walt laughed.

  Walt turned the dials back to the unearthly symphony. “At C2, that might come from Sirius,” he said, listening carefully. “Sounds like Chinese.”

  “Oh, now look,” Don objected. “What on earth would a Chinese symphony be doing with a driver modulator system?”

  “Broadcasting—”

  “Nope. The idea of detecting driver radiation is as old as the hills. If any culture had uncovered driver-beam transmission we’d all have been aware of it. So far as I know, we and the Terran Electric crowd are the only ones who have had any kind of an opportunity of working with this sub-etheric energy. Wes, have you another miniature of the relay tube handy?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I’m going to see if this stuff can be made directional. You’re bringing whatever it is into the place on a collector plate and slamming it into an input-terminal power transmission tube. It goes across the table to the relay tube, and is amplified, and then is tossed across more table to the load-terminal tube where the output is impressed across your alloy disk. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “I want another relay tube. I’m going to use it for a directional input beam, aligning it in the same way that Jim Baler and Barney Carroll did their first find. The one that sucked power out of the electric light, turned off the city hall, and so on. Follow?”

  “Perfectly. Yes, I’ve got a couple of them. But they’re not connected like Walt’s setup was.”

  “Well, that three-tube system was built on sheer guesswork some time ago. We can tap in the relay tube and haul out a set of cables that will energize the first relay tube. Hang her on gimbals, and we’ll be going hunting.”

  “Shall I have Freddie return?”

  “Yes. We’ll have Warren’s gang build us up about six of these things just as we have here.”

  “That won’t take long,” said Walt. “They’re working on the tuning disks now, and we should have ‘em by the time that Freddie gets back here.”

  “But this wild and wooly music. It’s alien.”

  Wes turned from the teletype and dug in the cabinet for the extra relay tube. He up-ended the chassis containing Walt’s setup and began to attach leads to the voltage supply, cabling them neatly and in accordance with the restrictions on lead capacities that some of the anodes needed.

  “It’s alien,” said Wes in agreement. “I’m going to shut it off now while I tinker with the tube.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Don. “Here comes Jim. Maybe he’d like to hear it.”

  “Hear what,” asked Jim Baler, entering the door.

  “We’ve a Syrian symphony,” explained Don, giving Jim the background all the way to the present time.

  Jim listened, and then said:

  “As an engineer, I’ve never heard anything like that in my life before. But, as a student of ancient languages and arts and sciences, I have. That’s Chinese.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Oh, yes, but definitely.”

  “Ye gods!”

  “I agree.”

  “But how—where?”

  “And/or when?”

  Channing sat down hard. He stared at the wall for minutes. “Chinese. Oh, great, slipper
y, green, howling catfish!” He picked up the phone and called the decoupler room, where the messages were sorted as to destination upon their entry into the station.

  “Ben? Look, have we a ship beam on anything of Chinese registry?”

  Ben said wait a minute while he checked. He returned and said: “Four, the Lady of Cathay, the Mandarin’s Daughter, the Dragoness, and the Mongol Maid. Why?”

  “Put a message on each of ‘em, asking whether they have any Chinese music on board.”

  “And then what? They can’t answer.”

  “Make this an experimental request. If any of them are using any recordings of Chinese music, tell them to have their electronics chief replace the phonograph pickup with a microphone—disturbing absolutely nothing—and to reply as if we could hear them. Get me?”

  “Can you? Hear ‘em I mean.”

  “We hear something, and Jim says it’s Chinese.”

  “It’s worth a try then. See you later.”

  “Will they?” asked Jim, interested in the workings of this idea.

  “Sure. Ever since we steered the Empress of Kolain out of the grease with the first station-to-ship beam, all three of the interplanetary companies have been more than willing to cooperate with any of our requests as long as we precede the message with the explanation that it’s experimental. They’ll do anything we ask ‘em to, short of scuttling the ship.”

  “Nice hookup. Hope it works.”

  “So do I,” said Wes. “This, I mean. I’ve got our directional gadget hooked up.”

  “Turn it on.”

  The wailing of the music came in strong and clear. Wes turned the input tube on its support, and the music passed through a loud peak and died off on the far side to almost zero. He adjusted the mobile tube for maximum response and tightened a small set screw.

  “It’s a shame we haven’t got a nice set of protractors and gimbals,” he said. “I had to tear into the desk lamp to get that flexible pipe.”

  “Small loss. She’s directional, all right. We’ll get the gimbals later. Right now I don’t want this turned off, because we may hear something interesting—Whoops! It went off by itself!”