Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC

by George O. Smith

  “Ask the Martians. They know.”

  “You ask ‘em. What shall we do, invent a time machine and go back sixty centuries?”

  “Wish we could,” said Barney. “I’d like to ask the bird that left this textbook why they didn’t clarify it more.”

  “Speaking of Don Channing again,” said Jim, “I’ll bet a hat that one of his tube-replacement manuals for the big transmitters out on Venus Equilateral do not even mention that the transmitter requires a receiver before it is any good. We think we’re modern. We are, and we never think that someday some poor bird will try to decipher our technical works. Why, if Volta himself came back and saw the most perfect machine ever invented—the transformer—he’d shudder. No connection between input and output, several kinds of shorted loops of wire; and instead of making a nice simple electromagnet, we short the lines of force and on top of that we use a lot of laminations piled on top of one another instead of a nice, soft iron core. We completely short the input, et cetera, but how do we make with a gadget like that?”

  “I know. We go on expecting to advance. We forget the simple past. Remember the lines of that story: ‘How does one chip the flint to make the best arrowhead?’ I don’t know who wrote it any more than I know how to skin a boar, but we do get on without making arrowheads or skinning boars or trimming birchbark canoes.”

  “All right, but there’s still this problem.”

  “Remember how we managed to align this thing? I wonder if it might not take another alignment to make it work as a relay.”

  “Could be,” said Jim. “I‘ll try it. Christine, you work these screws at the same time we do, and make the current come out as low as we can.”

  They returned to their stations and began to work on the alignment screws. Jim came out first on the receiver. Christine was second on the transmitter, while Barney fumbled for a long time with the relay tube.

  Then Christine called: “Fellows, my meter readings are climbing up again. Shall I diddle?”

  “Wait a minute,” said Barney. “That means I’m probably taking power out of that gadget you have in there. Leave ‘em alone.”

  He fiddled a bit more, and then Jim called: “Whoa, Nellie. Someone just lost me a milliammeter. She wound up on the far end.”

  “Hm-m-m,” said Barney, “so we’re relaying.”

  “Go ahead,” said Jim. “I’ve got a ten-ampere meter on here now.”

  Barney adjusted his screws some more.

  “Wait a minute,” said Jim. “I’m going to shunt this meter up to a hundred amps.”

  “What?” yelled Barney.

  “Must you yell?” asked Christine ruefully. “These phones are plenty uncomfortable without some loudmouthed bird screaming.”

  “Sorry, but a hundred amps … Whoosh! What have we got here, anyway?”

  “Yeah,” said Christine. “I was about to say that my input meter is running wild again.”

  “Gone?”

  “Completely. You shouldn’t have hidden it behind that big box. I didn’t notice it until just now, but she’s completely gone.”

  “I’ll be over. I think we’ve got something here.”

  -

  An hour passed, during which nothing of any great importance happened. By keying the transmitter tube, meters in the receiver tube were made to read in accordance. Then they had another conclave.

  “Nothing brilliant,” said Jim. “We could use super-output voice amplifiers and yell halfway across the planet if we didn’t have radio. We can radio far better than this cockeyed system of signaling.”

  “We might cut the power.”

  “Or spread out quite a bit. I still say, however, that this is no signaling system.”

  “It works like one.”

  “So can a clothesline be made to serve as a transmitter of intelligence. But its prime function is completely different.”

  “S’pose we have a super-clothesline here?” asked Christine.

  “The way that hammer felt last night, I’m not too sure that this might not be some sort of tractor beam,” said Jim.

  “Tractor beams are mathematically impossible.”

  “Yeah, and they proved conclusively that a bird cannot fly,” said Jim. “That was before they found the right kind of math. Up until Clerk Maxwell’s time, radio was mathematically impossible. Then he discovered the electromagnetic equations, and we’re squirting signals across the Inner System every day. And when math and fact do not agree, which changes?”

  “The math. Galileo proved that. Aristotle said that a heavy stone will fall faster. Then Galileo changed the math of that by heaving a couple of boulders off the Leaning Tower. But what have we here?”

  “Has anyone toyed with the transmission of power?”

  “Sure,” Barney answered; “A lot of science-fiction writers have their imaginary planets crisscrossed with transmitted power. Some broadcast it, some have it beamed to the consumer. When they use planes, they have the beam coupled to an object finder so as to control the direction of the beam. I prefer the broadcasting, myself. It uncomplicates the structure of the tale.”

  “I mean actually?”

  “Oh, yes. But the losses are terrific. Useful power transmission is a minute percentage of the total output of the gadget. Absolutely impractical, especially when copper and silver are so plentiful to string along the scenery on steel towers. No good.”

  “But look at this cockeyed thing. Christine puts in a couple of hundred amps; I take them off my end. Believe it or not, the output meter at my end was getting a lot more soup than I was pouring in.”

  “And my gadget was not taking anything to speak of,” said Barney.

  “Supposing it was a means of transmitting power. How on Mars did they use a. single tower there in the middle of the Red Desert? We know there was a Martian city at Canalopsis, and another one not many miles from Lincoln Head. Scribbled on the outer cover of this book is the legend: ‘Tower Station, Red Desert,’ and though the Martians didn’t call this the ‘Red Desert’, the terminology will suffice for nomenclature.”

  “Well?” asked Jim.

  “You notice they did not say: ‘Station No. 1,’ or ‘3’ or ‘7.’ That means to me that there was but one.”

  “Holy Smoke! Fifteen hundred miles with only one station? On Mars the curvature of ground would put such a station below the electrical horizon—” Jim thought that one over for a minute and then said: “Don’t tell me they bent the beam?”

  “Either they did that or they heated up the sand between,” said Barney cryptically. “It doesn’t mind going through nonconducting walls, but a nice, fat ground—Blooey, or I miss my guess. That’d be like grounding a high line.”

  “You’re saying that they did bend—Whoosh, again!”

  “What was that alignment problem? Didn’t we align the deflecting anodes somehow?”

  “Yeah, but you can’t bend the output of a cathode ray tube externally of the deflection plates.”

  “But this is not electron-beam stuff,” Barney objected. “This is as far ahead of cathode ray tubes as they are ahead of the Indian signal drum or the guy who used to run for twenty-four miles from Ghent to Aix.”

  “That one was from Athens to Sparta,” explained Christine, “the Ghent-to-Aix journey was a-horseback, and some thousand-odd years after.”

  “Simile’s still good,” said Barney. “There’s still a lot about this I do not understand.”

  “A masterpiece of understatement, if I ever heard one,” laughed Jim. “Well, let’s work on it from that angle. Come on, gang, to horse!”

  “Now,” said Altas, “you will find that the best possible efficiency is obtained when the currents in these two resistances are equal and opposite in direction. That floats the whole tube on the system, and makes it possible to run the tube without any external power source. It requires a starter source for aligning and for standby service, and for the initial surge; then it is self-sustaining. Also the in-phase voltage cannot be better obtai
ned than by exciting the phasing anode with some of the main-line power. That must always be correctly phased. We now need the frequency generator no longer, and by increasing the power rheostat to full, the tube will take up the load. Watch the meters, and when they read full power you may throw the cutover switch and make the tube self-sustaining. Our tower will then be in perfect service, and you and I may return to our home below.”

  Than performed the operations, and then they left, taking the old tube with them.

  And on Terra, Sargon of Akkad watched ten thousand slaves carry stone for one of his public buildings. He did not know that on one of the stars placed in the black bowl of the evening sky for his personal benefit, men were flinging more power through the air than the total output of all his slaves combined. Had he been told, he would have had the teller beheaded for lying, because Sargon of Akkad couldn’t possibly have understood it—

  -

  “You know, we’re missing a bet,” said Jim. “This in-phase business here. Why shouldn’t we hang a bit of the old wall-socket juice in here?”

  “That might be the trick,” said Barney.

  Jim made the connections, and they watched the meters read up and up and up—and from the street below them a rumbling was heard. Smoke issued from a crevasse in the pavement, and then with a roar, the street erupted and a furrow three feet wide and all the way across the street from Jim Baler’s residence to Barney Carroll’s garage lifted out of the ground. It blew straight up and fell back, and from the bottom of the furrow the smoldering of burned and tortured wiring cast a foul smell.

  “Wham!” said Barney, looking at the smoking trench. “What was that?”

  “I think we’ll find that it was the closest connection between our places made by the Electric Co.,” said Jim.

  “But what have we done?”

  “I enumerate,” said Christine, counting off on her fingers. “We’ve blasted in the facade of the City Hall. We’ve caused a couple of emergency flier landings within the city limits. We’ve blown fuses and circuit-breakers all the way from here to the main powerhouse downtown. We’ve stalled a few dozen automobiles, We’ve torn or burned or cut the end off one hammer and have fractured the wall with it—Where did that go, anyway, the hammerhead? We’ve burned wallpaper. We’ve run our electric bill up to about three hundred dollars, I’ll bet. We’ve bunged up a dozen meters. And now we’ve ripped up a trench in the middle of the street.”

  “Somewhere in this setup, there is a return circuit,” said Jim thoughtfully. “We’ve been taking power out of the line, and I’ve been oblivious of the fact that a couple of hundred amperes is too high to get out of our power line without trouble. What we’ve been doing is taking enough soup out of the public utility lines to supply the losses only. The power we’ve been seeing on our meters is the buildup, recirculated!”

  “Huh?”

  “Sure. Say we bring an amp in from the outside and shoot it across the street. It goes to the wires and comes back because of some electrical urge in our gadgets here, and then goes across the street in-phase with the original. That makes two amps total crossing our beam. The two come back and we have two plus two. Four come back, and we double again and again until the capability of our device is at saturation. All we have to do is to find the ground return and hang a load in there. We find the transmitter-load input, and supply that with a generator. Brother, we can beam power all the way from here to Canalopsis on one relay tower!”

  Barney looked at his friend. “Could be.”

  “Damned right. What other item can you think of that fits this tower any better? We’ve run down a dozen ideas, but this works. We may be arrested for wrecking Lincoln Head, but we’ll get out as soon as this dingbat hits the market. Brother, what a find!”

  “Fellows, I think you can make your announcement now,” smiled Christine. “They won’t burn you at the stake if you can bring electric power on a beam of pure nothing. This time you’ve hit the jackpot!”

  -

  It is approximately forty-five hundred Terran years since Sargon of Akkad held court, lighted by torch. It is the same number of years, Terran, since Than and Altas replaced the link in a power system that tied their cities together.

  It is about the same number of years since the beam tower fell into the Red Desert and the mighty system of beamed power became lost as an art. But once again the towers dot the plains, not only of Mars, but of Venus and Terra, too.

  And though they are of a language understood by the peoples of three worlds, the manuals of instruction would be as cryptic to Than as his manual was to Barney Carroll and Jim Baler.

  People will never learn.

  -

  Interlude

  Don Channing: Initial problem was to develop ship-to-planet communication, if not ship-to-ship. And since, as a general rule, anything that could be used to transmit power could also be used to transmit information, Channing went to Mars to seek out Messrs. Baler and Carroll. Strangely enough, the problem of communicating from planet to ship was not solved—nor would it be complete until some means of returning messages was devised, for the cams that kept the beams pointed to the place where the invisible spacecraft was supposed to be had no way of knowing when the ship might swerve to miss a meteor. Many were the messages that went into space—undelivered—because a ship dodged a meteor that might have been dangerous. Postulating the rather low possibility of danger made little difference: misdirected messages were of less importance than even the remote danger of death in the skies.

  But Don Channing’s luck was running low. On arrival at Lincoln Head, he discovered that Baler and Carroll had packed up their tube and left for Terra. Keg Johnson knew about it; he informed Channing that the foremost manufacturer of electrical apparatus had offered a lucrative bid for the thing as it stood and that Big Jim Baler had grinned, saying that the money which the Terran Electric Company was tossing around would permit the two of them, Carroll and himself, to spend the rest of their lives digging around the artifacts of Mars in style.

  So Channing sent word to Venus Equilateral and told them to get in touch with either the Baler-Carroll combine or Terran Electric and make dicker.

  Then he started to make the journey back to Venus Equilateral on the regular spacelanes …

  -

  Off The Beam

  Thirty hours out of Mars for Terra, the Ariadne sped along her silent, invisible course. No longer was she completely severed from all connection with the planets of the inner system; the trick cams that controlled the beams at Venus Equilateral kept the ship centered by sheer mathematics in spite of her thirty hours at two G, which brought her velocity to eleven hundred miles per second.

  What made this trip ironic was the fact that Don Channing was aboard. The beams had been bombarding the Ariadne continually ever since she left Mars with messages for the Director of Communications. In one sense, it seemed funny that Channing was for once on the end of a communications line where people could talk to him but from which he could not talk back. On the other hand, it was a blessing in disguise, for the Director was beginning to papertalk himself into some means of contacting Venus Equilateral from a spaceship.

  A steward found Channing in the salon and handed him a ‘gram. Channing smiled, and the steward returned the smile, adding: “You’ll fix these ships to talk back one day. Wait till you read that one—you’ll burn from here to Terra!”

  “Reading my mail?” asked Channing cheerfully.

  The average spacegram was about as secret as a postcard, so Channing didn’t mind. He turned the page over and read:

  -

  HOPE YOU’RE WELL, FILLED WITH GRAVANOL AND ADHESIVE TAPE FOR YOUR JUMP FROM TERRA TO STATION. SHALL TAKE GREAT DELIGHT IN RIPPING ADHESIVE TAPE OFF YOUR MEASLY BODY.

  LOVE,

  ARDEN.

  -

  “She will, too,” Don grinned. “Well, I’d like to toss her one back, but she’s got me there. I’ll just fortify myself at the bar and think up a few
choice ones for when we hit Mojave.”

  “Some day you’ll be able to answer those,” the steward promised. “Mind telling me why it’s so tough?”

  “Not at all,” smiled Channing. “The problem is about the same as encountered by the old-time cowboy. It’s a lot easier to hit a man on a moving horse from a nice, solid rock than it is to hit a man on a nice, solid rock from a moving horse. Venus Equilateral is quite solid as things go. But a spaceship’s course is fierce. We’re wobbling a few milliseconds here and a few there, and by the time you use that arc to swing a line of a hundred million miles, you’re squirting quite a bit of sky. We’re tinkering with it right now, but so far we have come up with nothing. Ah, well, the human race got along without electric lights for a few million years, so we can afford to tinker with an idea for a few months. Nobody is losing lives or sleep because we can’t talk with the boys back home.”

  “We’ve been hopping from planet to planet for quite a number of years, too,” said the steward. “Quite a lot of them went by before it was even possible to contact a ship in space.”

  “And that was done because of an emergency. Probably this other thing will go on until we hit an emergency; then we shall prove that old statement about a loaf of bread being the maternal parent of a locomotive.” Channing lit a cigarette and puffed deeply. “Where do we stand?”

  “Thirty hours out,” answered the steward. “About ready for turnover. I imagine that the power engineer’s gang is changing cathodes about now.”

  “It’s a long drag,” said Channing. He addressed himself to his glass and began to think of a suitable answer for his wife’s latest thrust.

  -

  Bill Hadley, of the power engineer’s gang, spoke to the pilot’s greenhouse below the ship. “Hadley to the pilot room; cathodes 1 and 3 ready.”

  “Pilot Greenland to Engineer Hadley: Power fade-over from even to odd now under way. Tubes 2 and 4 now dead; load on 1 and 3. You may enter 2 and 4 now.”

  “Check!”

  Hadley cracked an air valve beside a circular air door. The hiss of entering air crescendoed and died, and then Hadley cracked the door that opened in upon the huge driver tube. With casual disregard for the annular electrodes that would fill the tube with sudden death if the pilot sent the driving power surging into them, Hadley climbed to the top of the tube and used a spanner to remove four huge bolts. A handy differential pulley permitted him to lower the near-exhausted cathode from the girders to the air door, where it was hauled to the deck. A fresh cathode was slung to the pulley and hoisted to place. Hadley bolted it tight and clambered back into the ship. He closed the air door and the valve, and then opened the valve that led from the tube to outer space. The tube evacuated and Hadley spoke once more to the pilot room.