Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC

by George O. Smith

  “Nuts,” said Jim, “we would have to find a thing like this but empty. That’s our luck. What’s the book, Barney?”

  “Some sort of text, I’d say. Full of diagrams and what seems to be mathematics. Hard to tell, of course, but we’ve established the fact that mathematics is universal, though the characters cannot possibly be.”

  “Any chance of deciphering it?” asked Jim.

  “Let’s get back in the flier and try. I’m in no particular hurry.”

  “Nor am I. I don’t care whether we get to Lincoln Head tonight or the middle of next week.”

  -

  “Now let’s see that volume of diagrams,” Barney said as soon as they were established in the flier.

  Jim passed the book over, and Barney opened the book to the first page. “If we never find anything else,” he said, “this will make us famous. I am now holding the first complete volume of Martian literature that anyone has ever seen. The damned thing is absolutely complete, from cover to cover!”

  “That’s a find,” Jim agreed. “Now go ahead and transliterate it—you’re the expert on Martian pictographs.”

  For an hour, Barney scanned the pages of the volume. He made copious notes on sheets of paper which he inserted between the metal leaves of the book. At the end of that time, during which Jim Baler had been inspecting the searchlight thing on top of the little house, Barney called to his friend, and Jim entered the flier lugging the thing on his shoulders.

  “What’cha got?” he grinned. “I brought this along. Nothing else in that shack, so we’re complete except for the remnants of some very badly corroded cable that ran from this thing to the flapping end down where the tower was broken.”

  Barney smiled and blinked.

  It was strange to see this big man working studiously over a book; Barney Carroll should have been leading a horde of Venusian engineers through the Palanortis Country instead of delving into the artifacts of a dead civilization.

  “I think that this thing is a sort of engineer’s handbook,” he said. “In the front there is a section devoted to mathematical tables. You know, a table of logs to the base twelve, which is because the Martians had six fingers on each hand. There is what seems to be a table of definite integrals—at least, if I were writing a handbook I’d place the table of integrals at the last part of the math section. The geometry and trig is absolutely recognizable because of the designs. So is the solid geom and the analyt for the same reason. The next section seems to be devoted to chemistry; the Martians used a hexagonal figure for a benzene ring, too, and so that’s established. From that we find the key to the Periodic Chart of the Atoms, which is run vertically instead of horizontally, but still unique. These guys were sharp, though; they seem to have hit upon the fact that isotopes are separate elements, though so close in grouping to one another that they exhibit the same properties. Finding this will uncover a lot of mystery.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Baler, “from a book of this kind we can decipher most anything. The keying on a volume of physical constants is perfect and almost infinite in number. What do they use for Pi?”

  “Circle with a double dot inside.”

  “And Planck’s Constant?”

  “Haven’t hit that one yet. But we will. But to get back to the meat of this thing, the third section deals with something strange. It seems to have a bearing on this gadget from the top of the tower. I’d say that the volume was a technical volume on the construction, maintenance, and repair of the tower and its functions—whatever they are.”

  Barney spread the volume out for Jim to see, “That dingbat is some sort of electronic device. Or, perhaps subelectronic. Peel away that rusted side and we’ll look inside.”

  Jim peeled a six-inch section from the side of the big metal tube, and they inspected the insides. Barney looked thoughtful for a minute and then nipped the pages of the book until he came to a diagram.

  “Sure,” he said exultantly, “this is she. Look, Jim, they draw a cathode like this, and the grids are made with a series of fine parallel lines. Different, but more like the real grid than our symbol of a zigzag line. The plate is a round circle instead of a square, but that’s so clearly defined that it comes out automatically. Here’s your annular electrodes, and the—call ‘em deflection plates. I think we can hook this do-boodle up as soon as we get to our place in Lincoln Head.”

  “Let’s go, then. Not only would I like to see this thing work, but I’d give anything to know what it’s for!”

  “You run the crate,” said Barney, “and I’ll try to decipher this mess into voltages for the electrode-supply and so on. Then we’ll be in shape to go ahead and hook her up.”

  -

  The trip to Lincoln Head took almost an hour. Barney and Jim landed in their landing yards and took the book and the searchlight thing inside. They went to their laboratory, and called for sandwiches and tea. Jim’s sister brought in the food a little later and found them tinkering with the big beam tube.

  “What have you got this time?” she groaned.

  “Name it and it’s yours,” Barney laughed.

  “A sort of gadget that we found on the Red Desert.”

  “What does it do?” asked Christine Baler.

  “Well,” said Jim, “it’s a sort of a kind of dingbat that does things.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Christine. “A do-lolly that plings the inghams.”

  “Right!”

  “You’re well met, you two. Have your fun. But for Pete’s sake, don’t forget to eat. Not that you will—I know you—but a girl has got to make some sort of attempt at admonishment. I’m going to the moom pitcher. I’ll see you when I return.”

  “I’d say stick around,” said Barney. “But I don’t think we’ll have anything to show you for hours and hours. We’ll have something by the time you return.” Christine left, and the men applied themselves to then: problem. Barney had done wonders in unraveling the unknown. Inductances, he founds were spirals; resistances were dotted lines; capacitances were parallel squares.

  “What kind of stuff do we use for voltages?” asked Jim.

  “That’s a long, hard trail,” laughed Barney. “Basing my calculations on the fact that their standard voltage cell was the same as ours, we apply the voltage as listed on my schematic here.”

  “Can you assume that their standard is the same as ours?”

  “Better,” said Barney. “The Terran standard cell—the well-known Weston Cell—dishes out what we call 1.0183 volts at twenty degrees C. Since the Martian description of their standard cell is essentially the same as the Terran, they are using the same thing. Only they use sense and say that a volt is the unit of a standard cell, period. Calculating their figures on the numerical base of twelve is tricky, but I’ve done it.”

  “You’re doing fine. How do you assume their standard is the same?”

  “Simple,” said Barney in a cheerful tone. “Thank God for their habit of drawing pictures. Here we have the well-known H tube. The electrodes are signified by the symbols for the elements used. Their Periodic Chart came in handy here. But look, mastermind!, this dinky should be evacuated don’t you think?”

  “If it’s electronic or subelectronic, it should be. We can solder up this breach here and apply the hyvac pump. Rig us up a power supply whilst I repair the blowout.”

  “Where’s the BFO?”

  “What do you want with that?” asked Jim.

  “The second anode takes about two hundred volts worth of eighty-four cycles,” Barney explained. “Has a sign that seems to signify ‘In Phase,’ but I’ll be darned if I know with what Y’know, Jim, this dingbat looks an awful lot like one of the drivers we use in our spaceships and driver-wing fliers.”

  “Yeah,” drawled Jim. “About the same recognition as the difference between Edison’s first electric light and a twelve-element, electron-multiplier, power-output tube. Similarly: they both have cathodes.”

  “Edison didn’t have a cathode—”

  �
�Sure he did. Just because he didn’t hang a plate inside of the bottle doesn’t stop the filament from being a cathode.”

  Barney snorted. “A monode, hey?”

  “Precisely. After which come diodes, triodes, tetrodes, pentodes, hexodes, heptodes—”

  “—and the men in the white coats. How’s your patching job?”

  “Fine. How’s your power-supply job?”

  “Good enough,” said Barney. “This eighty-four cycles is not going to be a sine wave at two hundred volts; the power stage of the BFO overloads just enough to bring in a bit of second harmonic.”

  “A beat-frequency oscillator was never made to run at that level,” complained Jim Baler. “At least, not this one. She’ll tick on a bit of second, I think.”

  “Are we ready for the great experiment?”

  “Yep, and I still wish I knew what the thing was for. Go ahead, Barney. Crack the big switch!”

  -

  Altas held up a restraining hand as Than grasped the main power switch. “Wait,” he said. “Does one stand in his sky flier and leave the ground at full velocity? Or does one start an internal combustion engine at full speed?”

  “No,” said the youngster. “We usually take it slowly.”

  “And like the others, we must tune our tube. And that we cannot do under full power. Advance your power lever one-tenth step and we’ll adjust the deflection anodes.”

  “I’ll get the equipment,” said Than. “I forgot that part.”

  “Never mind the equipment,” smiled Altas. “Observe.”

  Altas picked up a long screwdriver-like tool and inserted it into the maze of wiring that surrounded the tube. Squinting in one end of the big tube, he turned the tool until the cathode surface brightened slightly. He adjusted the instrument until the cathode was at its brightest, and then withdrew the tool.

  “That will do for your experimental setup.” Altas smiled. “The operation in service is far more critical and requires equipment. As an experiment, conducted singly, the accumulative effect cannot be dangerous, though if the deflection plates are not properly served with their supply voltages, the experiment is a failure. The operation of the tube depends upon the perfection of the deflection-plate voltages.”

  “No equipment is required, then?”

  “It should have been employed,” said Altas modestly. “But in my years as a beam-tower attendant, I have learned the art of aligning the plates by eye. Now, Son, we may proceed from there.”

  -

  Barney Carroll took a deep breath and let the power switch fall home. Current meters swung across their scales for an instant, and then the lights went out in the house!

  “Fuse blew,” said Barney shortly. He grumbled his way through the dark house and replaced the fuse. He returned smiling. “Fixed that one,” he told Jim. “Put a washer behind it.”

  “O.K. Hit the switch again.”

  Barney cranked the power over, and once more the meters climbed up across the scales. There was a groaning sound from the tube, and the smell of burning insulation filled the room. One meter blew with an audible sound as the needle hit the end stop, and immediately afterward the lights in the entire block went out.

  “Fix that one by hanging a penny behind it,” said Jim with a grin.

  “That’s a job for Martian Electric to do,” laughed Barney.

  Several blocks from there, an attendant in the substation found the open circuit-breaker and shoved it in with a grim smile. He looked up at the power-demand meter and grunted. High for this district, but not dangerous. Duration, approximately fifteen seconds. Intensity, higher than usual but not high enough to diagnose any failure of the wiring in the district. “Ah, well,” he thought, “we can crank up the blow point on this breaker if it happens again.”

  He turned to leave and the crashing of the breaker scared him out of a week’s growth. He snarled and said a few choice words not fit for publication. He closed the breaker and screwed the blow-point control up by two to one. “That’ll hold ‘em,” he thought, and then the ringing of the telephone called him to his office, and he knew that he was in for an explanatory session with some people who wanted to know why their lights were going on and off. He composed a plausible tale on his way to the phone. Meanwhile, he wondered about the unreasonable demand and concluded that one of the folks had just purchased a new power saw or something for their home workshop.

  “Crack the juice about a half,” suggested Barney. “That’ll keep us on the air until we find out what kind of stuff this thing takes. The book claims about one-tenth of the current drain for this unit. Something we’ve missed, no doubt.”

  “Let’s see that circuit,” said Jim. After a minute, he asked: “Look, guy, what are these screws for?”

  “They change the side plate voltages from about three hundred to about three hundred and fifty. I’ve got ‘em set in the middle of the range.”

  “Turn us on half voltage and diddle one of ‘em.”

  “That much of a change shouldn’t make the difference” Barney objected.

  “Brother, we don’t know what this thing is even for,” Jim reminded him. “Much less do we know the effect of anything on it. Diddle, I say.”

  “O.K., we diddle.” Barney turned on half-power and reached into the maze of wiring and began to tinker with one of the screws. “Hm-m-m,” he said after a minute. “Does things, all right. She goes through some kind of resonance point or something. There is a spot of minimum current here. There! I’ve hit it. Now for the other one.”

  For an hour, Barney tinkered with first one screw and then the other one. He found a point where the minimum current was really low; the two screws were interdependent and only by adjusting them alternately was he able to reach the proper point on each. Then he smiled and thrust the power on full. The current remained at a sane value.

  “Now what?” asked Barney.

  “I don’t know. Anything coming out of the business end?”

  “Heat.”

  “Yeah, and it’s about as lethal as a sun lamp. D’ye suppose the Martians used to artificially assist their crops by synthetic sunshine?”

  Barney applied his eye to a spectroscope. It was one of the newer designs that encompassed everything from short ultraviolet to long infrared by means of fluorescent screens at the invisible wavelengths. He turned the instrument across the spectrum and shook his head.

  “Might be good for a chest cold,” he said, “but you wouldn’t get a sunburn off of it. It’s all in the infra. Drops off like a cliff just below the deep red. Nothing at all in the visible or above. Gee,” he said with a queer smile, “you don’t suppose that they died off because of a pernicious epidemic of colds and they tried chest-cooking en masse!”

  “I’d believe anything if this darned gadget were found in a populated district,” said Jim. “But we know that the desert was here when the Martians were here, and that it was just as arid as it is now. They wouldn’t try farming in a place where iron oxide abounds.”

  “Spinach?”

  “You don’t know a lot about farming, do you?” asked Jim.

  “I saw a cow once.”

  “That does not qualify you as an expert on farming.”

  “I know one about the farmer’s daughter, and—”

  “Not even an expert on dirt fanning,” continued Jim. “Nope, Barney, we aren’t even close.”

  Barney checked the book once more and scratched his nose.

  “How about that eighty-four cycle supply,” asked Jim.

  “It’s eighty-four, all right. From the Martian habit of using twelve as a base, I’ve calculated the number to be eighty-four.”

  “Diddle that, too,” suggested Jim.

  “O.K.,” said Barney. “It doesn’t take a lot to crank that one around from zero to about fifteen thousand c.p.s. Here she goes!”

  Barney took the main dial of the beat-frequency oscillator and began to crank it around the scale. He went up from eighty-four to the top of the dial and the
n returned. No effect. Then he passed through eighty-four and started down toward zero.

  He hit sixty cycles and the jackpot at the same time! At exactly sixty cycles, a light near the wall dimmed visibly. The wallpaper scorched and burst into a smoldering flame on a wall opposite the dimmed light.

  Barney removed the BFO from the vicinity of sixty cycles and Jim extinguished the burning wallpaper.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Barney.

  “This is definitely some sort of weapon. She’s not very efficient right now, but we can find out why and then we’ll have something hot.”

  “What for?” Barney asked. “Nobody hates anybody anymore.”

  “Unless the birds who made this thing necessary return,” said Jim soberly. His voice was ominous. “We know that only one race of Martians existed, and they were all amicable. I suspect an inimical race from outer space—”

  “Could be. Some of the boys are talking about an expedition to Centauri right now. We could have had a visitor from somewhere during the past.”

  “If you define eternity as the time required for everything to happen once, I agree. In the past or in the future, we have or will be visited by a super race. It may have happened six thousand years ago.”

  “Did you notice that the electric light is not quite in line with the axis of the tube?” asked Barney.

  “Don’t turn it any closer,” said Jim. “In fact, I’d turn it away before we hook it up again.”

  “There she is. Completely out of line with the light. Now shall we try it again?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Barney turned the BFO gingerly, and at sixty cycles the thing seemed quite sane. Nothing happened. “Shall I swing it around?”

  “I don’t care for fires as a general rule,” said Jim. “Especially in my own home. Turn it gently, and take care that you don’t focus the tube full on that electric light.”

  Barney moved the tube slightly, and then with a cessation of noise, the clock on the wall stopped abruptly. The accustomed ticking had not been noticed by either man, but the unaccustomed lack-of-ticking became evident at once. Barney shut off the BFO immediately and the two men sat down to a head-scratching session.