“About equal to a snowball—you know where,” said Franks, looking slyly at Arden.
“Take off your coat, Walt. We’ve got a job.”
“You mean—Hey! Remind me to quit, Saturday.”
“This is dead in earnest, Walt.” Don told the engineer all he knew.
“Boy, this is a job I wouldn’t want my life to depend on. In the first place, we can’t beam a transmitter at them if we can’t see ‘em. And in the second place, if we did, they couldn’t receive us.”
“We can get a good idea of where they are and how they’re going,” said Channing. “That is common knowledge.”
“Astronomy is an exact science,” chanted Franks. “But by the time we figure out just where the Empress of Kolain is with respect to us at any given instant we’ll all be old men with gray beards. She’s crossing toward us on a skew curve—and we’ll have to beam it past Sol. It won’t be easy, Don. And then if we do find them, what do we do about it?”
“Let’s find them first and then work out a means of contacting them afterwards.”
“Don,” Arden interrupted, “what’s so difficult?”
Franks fell backward into a chair. Don turned to the girl and asked: “Are you kidding?”
“No. I’m just ignorant. What is so hard about it? We shoot beams across a couple of hundred million miles of space like nothing, and maintain communications at any cost. What should be so hard about contacting a ship?”
“In the first place, we can see a planet, and they can see us, so they can hold their beams. A spaceship might be able to see us, but they couldn’t hold a beam on us because of the side sway. We couldn’t see them until they are right upon us and so we could not hope to hold a beam on them. Spaceships might broadcast, but you have no idea what the square law of radiated power will do to a broadcast signal when millions upon millions of miles are counted hi. A half-million watts on any planet will not quite cover the planet as a service area on broadcast frequencies. But there’s a lot of difference between covering a few stinking miles of planet and a volume the size of the Inner Solar System. So they don’t try it. A spaceship may as well be on Rigel as far as contacting her in space goes.
“We might beam a wide-dispersion affair at them,” continued Channing. “But it would be pretty thin by the time it got there. And, having no equipment, they couldn’t hear us.”
“May we amend that?” asked Franks. “They are equipped with radio. But the things are used only in landing operations, where the distance is measured in miles, not Astronomical Units.”
“O.K.” Channing smiled. “It’s turned off during flight and we may consider the equipment as being nonexistent.”
“And, according to the chart, we’ve got to contact them before the turnabout,” Arden offered. “They must have time to deflect their course to Terra.”
“You think of the nicest complications,” said Channing. “I was just about to hope that we could flash them, or grab at ‘em with a skeeter. But we can’t wait until they pass us.”
“That will be the last hope,” admitted Franks. “But say! Did any bright soul think of shooting a fast ship after them from Canalopsis?”
“Sure. The answer is the same as Simple Simon’s answer to the Pieman: ‘Alas, they haven’t any!’ “
“No use asking why,” growled Franks. “O.K., Don, we’ll after ‘em. I’ll have the crew set up a couple of mass detectors at either end of the station. We’ll triangulate, and calculate, and hope to hit the right correction factor. We’ll find them and keep them in line. You figure out a means of contacting them, hub?”
“I’ll set up the detectors and you find the means,” Don suggested.
“No go. You’re the director of communications.”
Don sighed a false sigh. “Arden, hand me my electronics text,” he said.
“And shall I wipe your fevered brow?” she cooed.
“Leave him alone,” Franks directed. “You distract him.”
“It seems to me that you two are taking this rather lightly,” said Arden.
“What do you want us to do?” Don asked. “Get down on the floor and chew the rug? You know us better than that. If we can find the answer to contacting a spaceship in flight, we’ll add another flower to our flag. But we can’t do it by clawing through the first edition of Henney’s Handbook of Radio Engineering. It will be done by the seat of our pants, if at all; a pair of side-cutters, and a spool of wire, a hunk of string and a lump of solder, a—”
“A rag, a bone, and a hank of hair?” asked Franks.
“Leave Kipling out of this. He didn’t have to cover the entire Solar System. Let’s get cooking.”
Don and Walt left the office just a trifle on the fast side. Arden looked after them, out through the open door, shaking her head until she remembered something that she could do. She smiled and went to her typewriter, and pounded out a message back to Keg Johnson at Interplanet. It read:
-
CHANNING AND FRANKS AT WORK ON CONTACTING THE EMPRESS OF KOLAIN. WILL DO OUR BEST.
VENUS EQUILATERAL.
-
Unknowing of the storm, the Empress of Kolain sped silently through the void, accelerating constantly at one G. Hour after hour she was adding to her velocity, building it up to a speed that would make the trip in days, and not weeks. Her drivers flared dull red no more, for there was no atmosphere for the ionic stream to excite. Her few portholes sparkled with light, but they were nothing in comparison to the starry curtain of the background.
Her hull was of a neutral color, and though the sun glanced from her metal flanks, a reflection from a convex side is not productive of a beam of light. It spreads according to the degree of convexity and is lost.
What constitutes an apparent absence? The answer to that question is the example of a ship in space flight. The Empress of Kolain did not radiate anything detectable in the electromagnetic scale from ultra-long waves to ultra-high frequencies; nothing at all that could be detected at any distance beyond a few thousand miles. The sweep of her meteor-spotting equipment would pass a spot in micro-microseconds at a hundred miles; at the distance from Venus Equilateral the sweep of the beam would be so fleeting that the best equipment ever known or made would have no time to react, thus missing the signal.
Theorists claim a thing unexistent if it cannot be detected. The Empress of Kolain was invisible. It was undetectable to radio waves. It was in space, so no physical wave could be transmitted to be depicted as sound. Its mass was inconsiderable. Its size, as cosmic sizes go, was comparatively sub-microscopic, and therefore it would occult few, if any, stars. Therefore, to all intents and purposes, the Empress of Kolain was nonexistent, and would remain in that state of material non-being until it came to life again upon its landing at Venus.
Yet the Empress of Kolain existed in the minds of the men who were to find her. Like the shot unseen, fired from a distant cannon, the Empress of Kolain was coming at them with ever-mounting velocity, its unseen course a theoretical curve.
And the ship, like the projectile, would land if the men who knew of her failed in their purpose.
Don Channing and Walt Franks found their man in the combined dining room and bar. They surrounded him, ordered a sandwich and beer, and began to tell him their troubles.
Charles Thomas listened for about three minutes. “Boy,” he grinned, “being up in that shiny, plush-lined office has sure done plenty to your think-tank, Don.”
Channing stopped talking. “Proceed,” he said. “In what way has my perspective been warped?”
“You talk like Burbank,” said Thomas, mentioning a sore spot of some months past. “You think a mass detector would work at this distance? Nuts, fellow. It might, if there were nothing else in the place to interfere. But you want to shoot out near Mars. Mars is on the other side of the Sun—and Evening Star to anyone on Terra. You want us to shoot a slaphappy beam like a mass detector out past Sol; and then a hundred and forty million miles beyond, in the faint hope th
at you can triangulate upon a little mite of matter: a stinking six hundred-odd feet of aluminum hull mostly filled with air and some machinery and so on. Brother, what do you think all the rest of the planets will do to your piddling little beam? Retract, or perhaps abrogate the law of universal gravitation?”
“Crushed,” said Franks with a sorry attempt at a smile.
“Phew!” agreed Channing. “Maybe I should know more about mass detectors.”
“Forget it,” said Thomas. “The only thing that mass detectors are any good for is to conjure up beautiful bubble dreams, which anyone who knows about ‘em can break with the cold point of icy logic.”
“What would you do?” asked Channing.
“Damned if I know. We might flash ‘em with a big mirror—if we had a big mirror and they weren’t heading into the Sun.”
“Let’s see,” said Franks, making tabulations on the tablecloth. “They’re a couple of hundred million miles away. In order that your mirror present a recognizable disk, it should be about twice the diameter of Venus as seen from Terra. That’s eight thousand miles in—at the least visibility—say, eighty million, or a thousand-to-one ratio. The Empress of Kolain is heading at us from some two hundred million miles, so at a thousand-to-one ratio our mirror would have to be twenty thousand miles across. Some mirror!”
Don tipped Walt’s beer over the edge of the table, and while the other man was busy mopping up and muttering unprintables, said to Thomas: “This is serious and it isn’t. Nobody’s going to lose their skin if we don’t, but a problem has been put to us and we’re going to crack it if we have to skin our teeth to do it.”
“You can’t calculate their position?”
“Sure. Within a couple of hundred thousand miles we can. That isn’t close enough.”
“No, it isn’t,” Chuck agreed.
Silence fell for a moment. It was broken by Arden, who came in waving a telegram. She sat down and appropriated Channing’s glass, which had not been touched.
Don opened the sheet and read: “Have received information of your effort I repeat, spare no expense!” It was signed: “Keg Johnson, Interplanet.”
“Does that letter offer mean anything to you?” asked Arden.
“Sure,” agreed Don. “But at the same time, we’re stumped. Should we be doing anything?”
“Anything, I should think, would be better than what you’re doing at present. Or does that dinner-and-beer come under ‘expenses’?”
Arden stood up, tossed Channing’s napkin at him, and started toward the door. Channing watched her go, his hand making motions on the tablecloth. His eyes fell to the table and he took Franks’ pencil and drew a long curve from a spot of gravy on one side of the table to a touch of coffee stain on the other. The curve went through a bit of grape jelly near the first stain.
“Here goes the tablecloth strategist,” said Franks. “What now, little man?”
“That spot of gravy,” explained Don, “is Mars. The jelly is the Empress of Kolain. Coffee stain is Venus, and up here by this cigarette burn is Venus Equilateral. Get me?”
“Yep, that’s clear enough.”
“Now it would be the job for seventeen astronomers for nine weeks to predict the movements of this jelly spot with respect to the usual astral standards. But, fellows, we know the acceleration of the Empress of Kolain, and we know her position with respect to Mars at the instant of takeoff. We can correct for Mars’ advance along her—or his—orbit. We can figure the position of the Empress of Kolain from her angular distance from Mars! That’s the only thing we need know. We don’t give a ten-dollar damn about her true position.”
Channing began to write equations on the tablecloth. “You see, they aren’t moving so fast in respect to us. The course is foreshortened as they are coming almost in line with Venus Equilateral, curving outward and away from the Sun. Her course, as we see it from the station here, will be a long radius-upward curve, slightly on the parabolic side. Like all long-range cruises, the Empress of Kolain will hoist herself slightly above the plane of the ecliptic to avoid the swarm of meteors that follow about the Sun in the same plane as the planets, lifting the highest at the point of greatest velocity.”
“I get it,” said Franks. “We get the best beam controller we have to keep the planet on the cross hairs. We apply a spiral cam to advance the beam along the orbit. Right?”
“Right.” Don sketched a conical section on the tablecloth and added dimensions. He checked his dimensions against the long string of equations and nodded. “We’ll drive this cockeyed-looking cam with an isochronic clock, and then squirt a beam out there. Thank the Lord for the way our beam transmitters work.”
“You mean the effect of reflected waves?” asked Chuck.
“Sure,” grinned Don. “There’s plenty of radar operating at our transmitting frequencies or nearby. So far, no one has ever tried to radar anything as small as a spacecraft at that distance, though getting a radar signal from a planet is duck soup. Yet,” he reflected cheerfully, “there are a couple of things we have handy out here, and one of them is a plethora of power output. We can soup up one of our beam transmitters and use it with a tightened beam to get a radar fix off of the Empress of Kolain.”
“And then?” asked Franks.
“Then we will have left the small end, which I’ll give to you, Walt, so that you can have part of the credit.”
Walt shook his head. “The easy part,” he said un-cheerfully. “By which you mean the manner in which we contact them and make them listen to us?”
“That’s her,” said Don with a cheerful smile.
“Fine,” said Thomas. “Now what do we do?”
“Clear up this mess so we can make the cam. This drawing will do, just grab the tablecloth.”
Joe, the operator of Venus Equilateral’s one and only establishment for the benefit of the stomach, came up as the three men began to move their glasses and dishes over to an empty table.
“What makes with the tablecloth?” he asked. “Want a piece of carbon paper and another tablecloth?”
“No,” said Don nonchalantly. “This single copy will do.”
“We lose lots of tablecloths that way,” said Joe. “It’s tough, running a restaurant on Venus Equilateral. I tried using paper ones once, but that didn’t work. I had ‘em printed, but when the Solar System was on ‘em, you fellows drew schematic diagrams for a new coupler circuit. I put all kinds of radio circuits on them, and the gang drew plans for antenna arrays. I gave up and put pads of paper on each table, and the boys used them to make folded paper airplanes and they shot them all over the place. Why don’t you guys grow up?”
“Cheer up, Joe. But if this tablecloth won’t run through the blueprint machine, we’ll squawk!”
Joe looked downcast, and Franks hurried to explain: “It isn’t that bad, Joe. We won’t try it. We just want to have these figures so we won’t have to run through the math again. We’ll return the cloth.”
“Yeah,” said Joe at their retreating figures. “And for the rest of its usefulness it will be full of curves, drawings, and a complete set of astrogation equations.” He shrugged his shoulders and went for a new tablecloth.
Don, Walt, and Chuck took the improvised drawing to the machine shop, where they put it in the hands of the master mechanic.
“This thing has a top requirement,” Don told him. “Make it as quick as you can.”
Master Mechanic Michael Warren took the cloth and said: “You forgot the note. You know, ‘Work to dimensions shown, do not scale this drawing.’ Lord, Don, this silly-looking cam will take a man about six hours to do. It’ll have to be right on the button all over, no tolerance. I’ll have to cut it to the ‘T’ and then lap it smooth with polishing compound. Then what’ll you test it on?”
“Sodium light inferometer. Can you do it in four hours?”
“If nothing goes wrong. Brass all right?”
“Anything you say. It’ll only be used once. Anything of sufficient hardn
ess for a single usage will do.”
“I’ll use brass then. Or free-cutting steel may be better. If you make it soft you have the chance of cutting too much off with your lapping compound. We’ll take care of it, Don. The rest of this stuff isn’t too hard. Your framework and so on can be whittled out and pasted together from standard girders, right?”
“Sure. Plaster them together any way you can. And we don’t want them painted. As long as she works, phooey to the looks.”
“Fine,” said Warren. “I’ll have the whole business installed in the Beam Control Room in nine hours. Complete and ready to work.”
“That nine hours is a minimum?”
“Absolutely. After we cut and polish that screwball cam, we’ll have to check it, and then you’ll have to check it. Then the silly thing will have to be installed and its concentricity must be checked to the last wave of cadmium light. That’ll take us a couple of hours, I bet. The rest of the works will be ready, checked, and waiting for the goddam cam.”
“Yeah,” agreed Franks. “Then we’ll have to get up there with our works and put the electricals on the mechanicals. My guess, Don, is a good, healthy twelve hours before we can begin to squirt our signal.”
-
Twelve hours is not much in the life of a man; it is less in the life of a planet. The Terran standard of gravity is so small that it is expressed in feet per second. But when the two are coupled together as a measure of travel, and the standard Terran G is applied for twelve hours steady, it builds up to almost three hundred miles per second, and by the end of that twelve hours, six million miles have fled into the past.
Now take a look at Mars. It is a small, red mote in the sky, its diameter some four thousand miles. Sol is eight hundred thousand miles in diameter. Six million miles from Mars, then, can be crudely expressed by visualizing a point eight times the diameter of the Sun away from Mars, and you have the distance that the Empress of Kolain had come from Mars.
But the ship was heading in at an angle, and the six million miles did not subtend the above arc. From Venus Equilateral, the position of the Empress of Kolain was more like two diameters of the Sun away from Mars, slightly to the north, and on the side away from Sol.
Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC Page 6
