Venus Equilateral
(1976)
George O. Smith
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Introduction
by Arthur C. Clarke
Like all science and science-fiction writers, I am used to talking glibly in millions of years, but it’s very hard to accept the fact that I started reading these stories more than thirty years ago. It seems only yesterday, and I can remember exactly how it happened.
Owing to the war, normal supplies of Astounding Stories (Analog’s precursor) had been cut off by the British authorities, who foolishly imagined that there were better uses for shipping space and hard-earned dollars. Luckily, before withdrawal symptoms had become too serious, my good friend Willy Ley came to the rescue. He conscientiously mailed me every issue until I was able to renew my subscription on the outbreak of peace.
So I read George O. Smith’s “Venus Equilateral” stories within a few weeks of their appearance, and greatly enjoyed them because I was obviously in the same line of business as the author. We were both working on radar, though that name had yet to enter the public domain. There was, however, a slight difference in the size of our hardware. My gear weighed about thirty tons and occupied two large trucks—and was the only sample of its kind ever built. (You’ll find the details, more or less, in the novel Glide Path.) George’s contraptions weighed a few ounces, were a couple of inches long, and were manufactured in tens of thousands. Even more remarkable, they were built to be shot from anti-aircraft guns—not a procedure recommended for delicate electronics equipment. (Especially vacuum tubes, which were all we had in those pre-transistor days.) I can still hardly believe in the “radio proximity fuse,” and have often wondered what crackpot invented it. He probably read science fiction.
I imagined that George wrote these stories as relaxation from the serious business of winning the war, and I momentarily expected him to run into trouble with Security. From time to time he skated on pretty thin ice, and in this he was in good company. Everyone knows how John W. Campbell, Jr. (then Editor of Astounding/Analog) was once visited by the FBI, and asked if he would kindly desist from publishing stories about the military uses of uranium …
Though there had been many tales about “space stations” long before the Venus Equilateral series (Murray Leinster’s “Power Planet” is a classic example from the early Thirties), George Smith was probably the first writer—certainly the first technically qualified writer—to spell out their uses for space communications. It is therefore quite possible that these stories influenced me subconsciously when, at Stratford-on-Avon during the closing months of the war, I worked out the principles of synchronous communications satellites now embodied in the global Intelsat system. Appropriately enough, the person who pointed this out to me is another longtime science-fiction fan: Dr. John Pierce, instigator of the Bell Laboratories program that led to Echo and Telstar.
It is interesting to see how George and I, who consider ourselves imaginative characters, both failed to anticipate the truly fantastic technical advances of the last few decades. We both thought that our “extraterrestrial relays” would be large, manned structures carrying armies of engineers—as, indeed, will one day be the case. Neither of us dreamed that most of the things we described would be done—within twenty years!—by a few pounds of incredibly miniaturized electronic equipment. And neither of us could possibly have foreseen the maser, that wonderful amplifying device which has made communication over “merely” planetary distances almost laughably simple.
Nevertheless, the problem which George Smith set out to solve remains, and will probably always remain. For short but annoying—and therefore intolerable—periods of time, the sun will block communications between planets and spacecraft. Some kind of repeater station will therefore be necessary to bypass signals around this million-mile-diameter obstacle.
Perhaps it will not be where George placed it, equidistant from Venus and the sun; for numerous reasons, a relay in Earth orbit, leading or trailing our planet by a constant few million miles, might be preferable. It is true that such a position would not be dynamically stable, but then I have always had doubts concerning the long-term stability of Venus Equilateral. Even mighty Jupiter cannot stop his “Trojan” asteroids from drifting back and forth over hundreds of millions of miles of orbit, and anything that approached Earth as closely as Venus Equilateral would be violently perturbed by our planet’s gravitational field. However, such wanderings would be of little practical importance, and if necessary could be corrected rather easily by modest amounts of rocket power. Witness the ease with which today’s synchronous satellites are kept on station over fixed lines of longitude, at the cost of a few pounds of fuel per year.
There is another respect in which George Smith, I am sure, correctly anticipates the future. Large, manned space stations will certainly not be used merely for communications. They will open up unlimited—literally—vistas for scientific research, technology, medicine, tourism, manufacturing, and even sport. Though not all the eventful happenings of the following space opera will actually materialize, you can be sure that still more surprising ones will.
And I hope that George and I are still around, another thirty years from now, to see how unimaginative we both were.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Colombo,
Sri Lanka
February 1976
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Venus Equilateral Relay Station, to give it the full name, was a manned satellite that occupied the libration point sixty degrees ahead of Venus along the planet’s orbit. It relayed radio messages among the three inner planets when the sun intervened.
Its usefulness was often misunderstood, since many persons think that the intervention of the sun means the physical presence of the obscuring mass dead in line. This is not so. The sun is a tremendous generator of radiothermal noise, and since communication fails when the signal-to-noise ratio becomes untenable, the relay station becomes useful or at least expedient, long before and long after solar syzygy.
Venus Equilateral and the persons who worked there were first reported as fiction in 1942 in Astounding Science Fiction under the title “QRM—Interplanetary,” the QRM signal being wireless telegraphers’ code, meaning, “I am being interfered with.” The report was popular; this was the beginning of a series that ran for three years and through thirteen novelettes.
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QRM—International Code signal meaning “interference” of controllable nature, such as man-made static, cross modulation from another channel adjoining, or willful obliteration of signals by an interfering source.
Interference not of natural sources such as electrical storms, common static, et cetera. (Designated by International Code as QRN.)
—Handbook, Interplanetary
Amateur Radio League
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QRM—Interplanetary
Korvus, the Magnificent, Nilamo of Yoralen, picked up the telephone in his palace and said: “I want to talk to Wilneda. He is at the International Hotel in Detroit, Michigan.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” came the voice of the operator. “Talking is not possible, due to the fifteen-minute transmission lag between here and Terra. However, teletype messages are welcome.”
Her voice originated fifteen hundred miles north of Yoralen, but it sounded as though she might be in the next room. Korvus thought for a moment and then said: “Take this message: ‘Wilneda: Add to order for mining machinery one type 56-XXD flier to replace washed-out model And remember, alcohol and energy will not mix!’ Sign that Korvus.”
“Yes, Mr. Korvus.”
“Not mister!” yelled the monarch, “I am Korvus the Magnificent! I am Nilamo of Yoralen!”
“Yes, your magnificence,” said the operator humbly. It was more than possible that she was stifling a laugh, which knowledge made the little man of Venus squirm in wrath. But there was nothing he could do about it, so he wisely said nothing.
To give Korvus credit, he was not a pompous little man. He was large—for a Venusian—which made him small according to the standards set up by the Terrestrians. He, as Nilamo of Yoralen, had extended the once-small kingdom outward to include most of the Palanortis Country, which extended from 23.0 degrees North Latitude to 61.7 degrees, and almost across the whole, single continent that was the dry land of Venus.
So Korvus’ message to Terra zoomed across the fifteen hundred rocky miles of Palanortis to Northern Landing. It passed high across the thousand-foot-high trees and over the mountain ranges. It swept over open patches of water, and across intervening cities and towns. It went with the speed of light and in a tight beam from Yoralen to Northern Landing, straight as a die and with person-to-person clarity. The operator in the city that lay across the North Pole of Venus clicked on a teletype, reading back the message as it was printed.
Korvus told her: “That is correct.”
“The message will be in the hands of your representative Wilneda within the hour.”
The punched tape from Operator No. 7’s machine slid along the line until it entered a coupling machine.
The coupling machine worked furiously. It accepted the tapes from seventy operators as fast as they could set them. It selected the messages as they entered the machine, placing a mechanical preference upon whichever message happened to be ahead of the others on the moving tapes. The master tape moved continuously at eleven thousand words per minute, taking teletype messages from everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere of Venus to Terra and Mars. It was a busy machine; even at eleven thousand words per minute it often got hours behind.
The synchronous-keyed signal from the coupling machine left the operating room and went to the transmission room. It was amplified and sent out of the city to a small, squat building at the outskirts of Northern Landing. It was hurled at the sky out of a reflector antenna by a thousand-kilowatt transmitter.
The wave seared against the Venusian Heaviside Layer. It fought and it struggled. And, as is the case with strife, it lost heavily in the encounter. The beam was resisted fiercely. Infiltrations of ionization tore at the radio beam, stripping and trying to beat it down.
But man triumphed over nature. The megawatt of energy that came in a tight beam from the building at Northern Landing emerged from the Heaviside Layer as a weak, piffling signal. It wavered and it crackled. It wanted desperately to lie down and sleep. Its directional qualities were impaired, and it wobbled badly. It arrived at the relay station tired and worn.
One million watts of ultra-high frequency energy at the start, it was measurable in microvolts when it reached a space station only five hundred miles above the city of Northern Landing.
The signal, as weak and as wobbly as it was, was taken in by eager receptors. It was amplified. It was dehashed, destaticked and deloused. And once again, one hundred decibels stronger and infinitely cleaner, the signal was hurled out on a tight beam from a gigantic parabolic reflector.
Across sixty-seven million miles of space went the signal. Across the orbit of Venus it went in a vast chord, and arrived at the Venus Equilateral Station with less trouble than the original transmission through the Heaviside Layer. The signal was amplified and demodulated. It went into a decoupler machine where the messages were sorted mechanically and sent, each to the proper channel, into other coupler machines. Beams from Venus Equilateral were directed at Mars and at Terra.
The Terra beam ended at Luna. Here it again was placed in the two-compartment beam and from Luna it punched down at Terra’s Layer, emerging into the atmosphere of Terra as weak and as tired as it had been when it had come out of the Venusian Heaviside Layer. It entered a station in the Bahamas, was stripped of the interference, and put upon the land beams. It entered decoupling machines that sorted the messages as to destination. These various beams spread out across the face of Terra, the one carrying Korvus’ message finally coming into a station at Ten Mile Road and Woodward. From this station, at the outskirts of Detroit, it went upon land wires downtown to the International Hotel.
The teletype machine in the office of the hotel began to click rapidly. The message to Wilneda was arriving.
And fifty-five minutes after the operator told Korvus that less than an hour would ensue, Wilneda was saying, humorously, “So, Korvus was drunk again last night—”
Completion of Korvus’ message to Wilneda completes also one phase of the tale at hand. It is not important. There were a hundred and fifty other messages that might have been accompanied in the same manner, each as interesting to the person who likes the explanation of the interplanetary communication service. But this is not a technical journal. A more complete explanation of the various phases that a message goes through in leaving a city on Venus to go to Terra may be found in the Communications Technical Review, Volume XXVII, number 8, pages 411 to 716. Readers more interested in the technical aspects are referred to the article.
It so happens that Korvus’ message was picked out of a hundred-odd messages because of one thing only. At the time that Korvus’ message was in transit through the decoupler machines at the Venus Equilateral Relay Station, something of a material nature was entering the air lock of the station.
It was an unexpected visit.
Don Channing looked up at the indicator panel in his office and frowned in puzzlement. He punched a buzzer and spoke into the communicator on his desk.
“Find out who that is, will you, Arden?”
“He isn’t expected,” came back the voice of Arden Westland.
“I know that. But I’ve been expecting someone ever since John Peters retired last week. You know why.”
“You hope to get his job,” said the girl in an amused voice. “I hope you do. So that someone else will sit around all day trying to make you retire so that he can have your job!”
“Now look, Arden, I’ve never tried to make Peters retire.”
“No, but when the word came that he was thinking of it, you began to think about taking over. Don’t worry, I don’t blame you.” There was quite a protracted silence, and then her voice returned. “The visitor is a gentleman by the name of Francis Burbank, He came out in a flitter with a chauffeur and alt.”
“Big shot, hey?”
“Take it easy. He’s coming up the office now.”
“I gather that he desires audience with me?” asked Don.
“I think that he’s here to lay down the law! You’ll have to get out of Peters’ office, if his appearance is any guide.”
Some more silence followed. The communicator was turned off at the other end, which made Channing fume. He would have preferred to hear the interchange of words between his secretary and the newcomer. Then, instead of having the man announced, the door opened and the stranger entered. He came to the point immediately.
“You’re Don Channing? Acting Director of Venus Equilateral?”
“I am.”
“Then I have some news for you, Dr. Channing. I have been appointed Director by the Interplanetary Communications Commission. You are to resume your position as Electronics Engineer.”
“Oh?” said Channing. “I sort of believed that I would be offered this position.”
“There was a discussion of that procedure. However, the commission decided that a man of more commercial training would better fill the position. The Communications Division has been operating at too small a profit. They felt that a man of commercial experience could cut expenses and so on to good effect. You understand their reasoning, of course,” said Burbank.
“Not exactly!”
“Well, it is like this. They know that a scientist is not usually the man to consider the cost of experimentation. Scientists build thousand-ton cyclotrons to convert a penny’s
worth of lead into one and one-tenth cents’ worth of lead and gold. And they use three hundred dollars’ worth of power and a million-dollar machine to do it with.
“They feel that a man with training like that will not know the real meaning of the phrase ‘cutting expenses.’ A new broom sweeps clean, Dr. Channing. There must be many places where a man of commercial experience can cut expenses. I, as Director, shall do so.”
“I wish you luck,” said Channing.
“Then, there is no hard feeling?”
“I can’t say that. It is probably not your fault, I cannot feel against you, but I do feel sort of let down at the decision of the commission. I have had experience in this job.”
“The commission may appoint you to follow me. If your work shows a grasp of commercial operations, I shall so recommend.”
“Thanks,” said Channing dryly. “May I buy you a drink?”
“I never drink. And I do not believe in it. If it were mine to say, I’d prohibit liquor from the premises. Venus Equilateral would be better off without it.”
Don Channing snapped the communicator. “Miss Westland, will you come in?”
She entered, puzzlement on her face.
“This is Mr. Burbank. His position places him in control of this office. You will, in the future, report to him directly. The report on the operations, engineering projects, and so on that I was to send in to the commission this morning will, therefore, be placed in Mr. Burbank’s hands as soon as possible.”
“Yes, Dr. Channing.” Her eyes held a twinkle, but there was concern and sympathy in than, too. “Shall I get them immediately?”
“They are ready?”
“I was about to put them on the tape when you called.”
“Then give them to Mr. Burbank.” Channing turned to Burbank. “Miss Westland will hand you the reports I mentioned. They are complete and precise. A perusal of them will put you in grasp of the situation here at Venus Equilateral better than will an all-afternoon conference. I’ll have Miss Westland haul my junk out of here. You may consider this as your office, it having been used by Dr. Peters. And, in the meantime, I’ve got to check up on some experiments on the ninth level.” Channing paused. “You’ll excuse me?”
Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC Page 1
