Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC

by George O. Smith

  “She’s good for burning wallpaper, dimming electric lights, and stopping clocks,” said Barney. “Any of which you could do without a warehouse full of cockeyed electrical equipment. Wonder if she’d stop anything more powerful than a clock.”

  “I’ve got a quarter-horse motor here. Let’s wind that up and try it.”

  The motor was installed on a bench nearby, and the experiment was tried again. At sixty cycles the motor groaned to a stop, and the windings began to smolder. But at the same time the big tube began to exhibit the signs of strain. Meters raced up their scales once more, reached the stops and bent. Barney shut off the motor, but the strains did not stop in the tube. The apparent overload increased linearly and finally the lights went out all over the neighborhood once more.

  “Wonderful,” said Barney through the darkness. “As a weapon, this thing is surpassed by everything above a fly swatter.”

  “We might be able to cook a steak with it—if it would take the terrific overload,” said Jim. “Or we could use it as an insect exterminator.”

  “We’d do better by putting the insect on an anvil and hitting it firmly with a five-pound hammer,” said Barney. “Then we’d only have the anvil and hammer to haul around. This thing is like hauling a fifty-thousand-watt radio transmitter around. Power supplies, BFO, tube, meters, tools, and a huge truck full of spare fuses for the times when we miss the insect. Might be good for a central heating system.”

  “Except that a standard electric unit is more reliable and considerably less complicated. You’d have to hire a corps of engineers to run the thing.”

  The lights went on again, and the attendant in the substation screwed the blow-point control tighter. He didn’t know it, but his level was now above the rating for his station. But had he known it he might not have cared. At least, his station was once more in operation.

  “Well,” said Barney, getting up from the table, “what have we missed?”

  -

  Altas said: “Now your unit is operating at its correct level. But, Son, you’ve missed one thing. It is far from efficient. Those two leads must be isolated from one another. Coupling from one to the other will lead to losses.”

  “Gosh,” said Than, “I didn’t know that.”

  “No, for some reason the books assume that the tower engineer has had considerable experience in the art. Take it from me, Son, there are a lot of things that are not in the books. Now isolate those leads from one another and we’ll go on.”

  -

  “While you’re thinking,” said Jim, “I’m going to lockstitch these cables together. It’ll make this thing less messy.”

  Jim got a roll of twelve-cord from the cabinet and began to bind the many supply leads into a neat cable.

  Barney watched until the job was finished, and then said: “Look, chum, let’s try that electric-light trick again.”

  They swung the tube around until it was in the original position, and turned the juice on. Nothing happened.

  Barney looked at Jim, and then reached out and pointed the big tube right at the electric light. Nothing happened.

  “Check your anode voltages again.”

  “All O.K.”

  “How about the aligning job?”

  Barney fiddled with the alignment screws for minutes, but his original setting seemed to be valid.

  “Back to normal,” said Barney. “Rip out your cabling.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sure. You did something. I don’t know what, but rip it out and fan out the leads. There is something screwy in the supply lines. I’ve been tied up on that one before; this thing looks like electronics, as we agree, and I’ve had occasion to remember coupling troubles.”

  “All right,” said Jim, and he reluctantly ripped out his lockstitching. He fanned the leads and they tried it again.

  Obediently, the light dimmed and the wallpaper burned.

  “Here we go again,” said Jim, killing the circuits and reaching for a small rug to smother the fire. “No wonder the Martians had this thing out in the middle of the desert. D’ye suppose that they were trying to find out how it works, too?”

  “Take it easier this time and we’ll fan the various leads,” said Barney. “There’s something tricky about the lead placement.”

  “Half-power,” announced Barney. “Now, let’s get that sixty cycles.”

  The light dimmed slightly and a sheet of metal placed in front of the tube became slightly warm to the touch. The plate stopped the output of the tube, for the wallpaper did not scorch. Jim began to take supply line after supply line from the bundle of wiring. About halfway through the mess, he hit the critical lead, and immediately the light went out completely and the plate grew quite hot.

  “Stop her!” yelled Barney.

  “Why?”

  “How do we know what we’re overloading this time?”

  “Do we care?”

  “Sure. Let’s point this thing away from that light. Then we can hop it up again and try it at full power.”

  “What do you want to try?”

  “This energy-absorption thing.”

  “Wanna burn out my motor?” Jim asked.

  “Not completely. This dingbat will stop a completely mechanical gadget, like a clock. It seems to draw power from electric lights. It stops electromechanical power. I wonder just how far it will go toward absorbing power. And also I want to know where the power goes.”

  The tube was made to stop the clock again. The motor groaned under the load put upon it by the tube. Apparently the action of the tube was similar to a heavy load being placed on whatever its end happened to point to. Barney picked up a small metal block and dropped it over the table.

  “Want to see if it absorbs the energy of a falling object—Look at that!”

  The block fell until it came inside of the influence of the tube. Then it slowed in its fall and approached the table slowly. It did not hit the table, it touched and came to rest.

  “What happens if we wind up a spring and tie it?” asked Jim.

  They tried it. Nothing happened.

  “Works on kinetic energy, not potential energy,” said Barney.

  He picked up a heavy hammer and tried to hit the table. “Like swinging a club through a tub of water,” he said.

  “Be a useful gadget for saving the lives of people who are falling,” said Jim thoughtfully.

  “Oh, sure. Put it on a truck and rush it out to the scene of the suicide.”

  “No. How about people jumping out of windows on account of fires? How about having one of the things around during a flier-training course? Think of letting a safe down on one of those beams, or taking a piano from the fifth floor of an apartment building.”

  “The whole apartment full of furniture could be pitched out of a window,” said Barney.

  “Mine looks that way now,” said Jim, “and we’ve only moved a couple of times. No, Barney, don’t give ‘em any ideas.”

  Jim picked up the hammer and tried to hit the table. Then, idly, he swung the hammer in the direction of the tube’s end.

  Barney gasped. In this direction there was no resistance. Jim’s swing continued, and the look on Jim’s face indicated that he was trying to brake the swing in time to keep from hitting the end of the tube. But it seemed as though he were trying to stop an avalanche. The swing continued on and on and finally ended when the hammer head contacted the end of the tube.

  There was a burst of fire. Jim swung right on through, whirling around off-balance and coming to a stop only when he fell to the floor. He landed in darkness again. The burst of fire emanated from the insulation as it flamed under the heat of extreme overload.

  This time the lights were out all over Lincoln Head. The whole city was in complete blackout!

  Candles were found, and they inspected the tube anxiously. It seemed whole. But the hammer head was missing. The handle was cut cleanly, on an optically perfect surface.

  Where the hammer head went, they couldn’t say. Bu
t on the opposite wall there was a fracture in the plaster that Jim swore hadn’t been there before. It extended over quite an area, and after some thought, Barney calculated that if the force of Jim’s hammer blow had been evenly distributed over that area on the wall, the fracturing would have been just about that bad.

  “A weapon, all right,” said Barney.

  “Sure. All you have to do is to shoot your gun right in this end and the force is dissipated over quite an area out of that end. In the meantime you blow out all of the powerhouses on the planet. If a hammer blow can raise such merry hell, what do you think the output of a sixteen-inch rifle would do? Probably stop the planet in its tracks. D’ye know what I think?”

  “No, do you?”

  “Barney, I think that we aren’t even close as to the operation and use of this device.”

  “For that decision, Jim, you should be awarded the Interplanetary Award for Discovery and Invention—posthumously!”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Dunno. How soon does this lighting situation get itself fixed?”

  “You ask me … I don’t know either.”

  “Well, let’s see what we’ve found so far.”

  “That’s easy,” said Jim. “It might be a weapon, but it don’t weap. We might use it for letting elevators down easy, except that it would be a shame to tie up a room full of equipment when the three-phase electric motor is so simple. We could toast a bit of bread, but the electric toaster has been refined to a beautiful piece of breakfast furniture that doesn’t spray off and scorch the wallpaper. We could use it to transmit hammer blows, or to turn out electric lights, but both of those things have been done very simply; one by means of sending the hammerer to the spot, and the other by means of turning the switch. And then in the last couple of cases, there is little sense in turning out a light by short-circuiting the socket and blowing all the fuses.”

  “That is the hard way,” smiled Barney. “Like hitting a telephone pole to stop the car, or cutting the wings off a plane to return it to the ground.”

  “So we have a fairly lucid book that describes the entire hookup of the thing except what it’s for. It gives not only the use of this device, but also variations and replacements. Could we figure it out by sheer deduction?”

  “I don’t see how. The tower is in the midst of the Red Desert. There is nothing but sand that assays high in iron oxide between Canalopsis, at the junction of the Grand Canal, and Lincoln Head. Might be hid, of course, just as this one was, and we’ll send out a crew of expert sub-sand explorers with under-surface detectors to cover the ground for a few hundred miles in any direction from the place where we found this. Somehow, I doubt that we’ll find much.”

  “And how do you—ah, there’s the lights again—deduce that?” asked Jim.

  “This gadget is or was of importance to the Martians. Yet in the Temple of Science and Industry at Canalopsis, there is scant mention of the towers.”

  “Not very much, hey?”

  “Very little, in fact. Of course the pictographs on the temple at Canalopsis show one tower between what appear two cities. Wavy lines run from one city to the tower and to the other city. Say! I’ll bet a cooky that this is some sort of signaling device!”

  “A beam transmitter?” asked Jim skeptically. “Seems like a lot of junk for just signaling. Especially when such a swell job can be done with standard radio equipment. A good civilization—such as the Martians must have had—wouldn’t piddle around with relay stations between two cities less than a couple of thousand miles apart. With all the juice this thing can suck, they’d be more than able to hang a straight broadcast station and cover halfway around the planet as ground-wave area. What price relay station?”

  “Nevertheless, I’m going to tinker up another one of these and see if it is some sort of signaling equipment.”

  The door opened and Christine Baler entered. She waved a newspaper before her brother’s eyes and said, “Boy, have you been missing it!”

  “What?” Barney asked. “Pixies or gremlins loose in Lincoln Head.”

  “Huh-huh. Read it,” said Jim.

  “Just a bunch of flash headlines. Fire on Manley Avenue. Three planes had to make dead-tube landings in the center of the city; power went dead for no good reason for about ten minutes. Facade of the City Hall caved in. Power plants running wild all over the place. Ten thousand dollars’ worth of electrical equipment blown out. Automobiles stalled in rows for blocks.”

  Jim looked at Barney. “Got a bear by the tail,” he said.

  “Could be,” admitted Barney.

  “Are you two blithering geniuses going to work all night?” asked Christine.

  “Nope. We’re about out of ideas. Except the one that Barney had about the gadget being some sort of signaling system.”

  “Why don’t you fellows call Don Channing? He’s the signaling wizard of the Solar System.”

  “Sure, call Channing. Every time someone gets an idea, everyone says, ‘Call Channing!’ He gets called for everything from Boy Scout wigwag ideas to super-cyclotronic-electron-stream beams to contact the outer planets. Based upon the supposition that people will eventually get there, of course.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, I—we, I mean—found this thing and we’re jolly well going to tinker it out. In spite of the fact that it seems to bollix up everything from electric lights to moving gears. I think we’re guilty of sabotage. Facade of the City Hall, et cetera, Barney, how long do you think it will take to tinker up another one of these?”

  “Few hours. They’re damned simple things in spite of the fact that we can’t understand them. In fact, I’m of the opinion that the real idea would be to make two: one with only the front end for reception, one for the rear end for transmission, and the one we found for relaying. That’s the natural bent, I believe.”

  “Could be. Where are you going to cut them?”

  “The transmitter will start just before the cathode, and the receiver will end just after the … uh, cathode.”

  “Huh?”

  “Obviously the cathode is the baby that makes with the end product. She seems to be a total intake from the intake end and a complete output from the opposite end. Right?”

  “Right, but it certainly sounds like heresy.”

  “I know,” said Barney thoughtfully, “but the thing is obviously different from anything that we know today. Who knows how she works?”

  “I give up.”

  Christine, who had been listening ,in an interested manner, said: “You fellers are the guys responsible for the ruckus that’s been going on all over Lincoln Head?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Well, brother warlocks, unless you keep your activities under cover until they’re worth mentioning, you’ll both be due for burning at the stake.”

  “O.K., Chris,” said Jim. “We’ll not let it out.”

  “But how are you going to tinker up that transmitter-relay-receiver system?”

  “Well take it from here to Barney’s place across the avenue and into his garage. That should do it.”

  “O.K., but now I’m going to bed,”

  “Shall we knock off, too?” asked Jim.

  “Yep. Maybe we’ll dream a good thought.”

  “So long, then. We’ll leave the mess as it is. No use cleaning up now, we’ll only have to mess it up again tomorrow with the same junk.”

  “And I’ll have that—or those—other systems tinkered together by tomorrow noon. That’s a promise,” said Barney. “And you,” he said to Christine, “will operate the relay station.”

  Altas said to Than: “Now that your system is balanced properly, and we have proved the worth of this tube as a replacement, we shall take it to the roof and install it. The present tube is about due for retirement.”

  “I’ve done well, then?” asked Than.

  “Considering all, you’ve done admirably. But balancing the device in the tower, and hooking into the circuit as an integra
l part is another thing. Come, Than. We shall close the line for an hour whilst replacing the tube.”

  “Is that permissible?”

  “At this time of the night the requirements are small. No damage will be done; they can get along without us for an hour. In fact, at this time of night, only the people who are running the city will know that we are out of service. And it is necessary that the tube be maintained at full capability. We can not chance a weakened tube; it might fail when it is needed the most.”

  Than carried the tube to the top of the tower, and Altas remained to contact the necessary parties concerning the shutoff for replacement purposes. He followed Than to the top, after a time, and said: “Now disconnect the old tube and put it on the floor. We shall replace the tube immediately, but it will be an hour before it is properly balanced again.”

  It was not long before Than had the tube connected properly.

  “Now,” said Altas, “turn it on one-tenth power and we shall align it.”

  “Shall I use the meters?”

  “I think it best. This requires perfect alignment. We’ve much power and considerable distance, and any losses will create great amounts of heat.”

  “All right,” said Than.

  He left the tower top to get the meters.

  -

  Barney Carroll spoke into a conveniently placed microphone. “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Go ahead,” said Christine.

  “We’re waiting,” said Jim.

  “You’re the bird on the transmitter,” said Barney to Jim. “You make with the juice.”

  Power rheostats were turned up gingerly, until Barney shouted to stop. His shout was blotted out by cries from the other two. They met in Barney’s place to confer.

  “What’s cooking?” asked Jim.

  “The meters are all going crazy in my end,” said Barney. “I seem to be sucking power out of everything in line with my tube.”

  “The so-called relay station is firing away at full power and doing nothing but draining plenty of power from the line,” complained Christine.

  “And on my end, I was beginning to scorch the wallpaper again. I don’t understand it. With no receiver end, how can I scorch wallpaper?”