“Can you key this?” asked Hadley.
“No need,” said Channing. “They know we’re in the grease. We know that if they can collect us, they’ll be on their way. I’m going to send out for a half-hour, and then resort to a five-minute transmission every fifteen minutes. They’ll get a ship after us with just about everything we’re liable to need, and they can use the five-minute transmission for direction finding. The initial shot will serve to give them an idea as to our direction. All we can do now is to wait,”
“And hope,” added Captain Johannson.
-
Electrically, Venus Equilateral was more silent than it had ever been. Not an electrical appliance was running on the whole station. People were cautioned about walking on deep-pile rugs, or combing their hair with plastic combs, or doing anything that would set up any kind of electronic charge. Only the highly filtered generators in the power rooms were running, and these had been shielded and filtered long years before; nothing would emerge from them to interrupt the ether. All incoming signals were stopped.
And the men who listened with straining ears claimed that the sky was absolutely clear, save for a faint crackle of cosmic static which they knew came from the corona of the Sun.
One group of men sat about a static-field indicator and cursed the minute wiggling of the meter, caused by the ever-moving celestial bodies and their electronic discharges. A sunspot emission passed through the station once, and though it was but a brief passage, it sent the electrostatic field crazy and made the men jump.
The men who were straining their ears to hear became nervous and were jumping at every loud crackle.
And though the man at the telescope knew that his probability of picking up a sight of the Ariadne was as slender as a spider’s web, he continued to search the starry sky. He swept the narrow cone of the heavens wherein the Ariadne was lost, according to the mathematical experts, and he looked at every bit of brightness in the field of his telescope as though it might be the missing ship.
The beam scanners watched their return plates closely. It was difficult because the receiver gains were set to maximum and every tick of static caused brief flashes of light upon their plates. They would jump at such a flash and hope for it to reappear on the next swipe, for a continuous spot of light would indicate the ship they sought. Then, as the spot did not reappear, they would go on with their beams to cover another infinitesimal portion of the sky. Moving forward across the cone of expectancy bit by bit, they crossed and re-crossed until they were growing restive.
Surely the ship must be there!
At the south-end landing stage, a group of men were busy stocking a ship. Supplies and necessities were carried aboard, while another group of men tinkered with the electrical equipment. They cleared a big space in the observation dome, and began to install a replica of the equipment used on the station for detection. No matter what kind of output Channing sent back, they would be able to follow it to the bitter end.
They made their installations in duplicate, with one piece of each equipment on opposite sides of the blunt dome. Balancing the inputs of each kind by turning the entire ship would give them an indication of direction.
Franks did not hope that the entire installation could be completed before the signal came, but he was trying to outguess himself by putting some of everything aboard. When and if it came, he would be either completely ready with everything, or he at least would have a good start on any one of the number of detectors. If need be, the detecting equipment in the station itself could be removed and used to complete the mobile installation.
Everything was in a complete state of nervous expectancy. Watchers watched, meter readers squinted for the barest wiggle, audio observers listened, trying to filter any kind of man-made note out of the irregular crackle that came in.
And the station announcing equipment was dead quiet, to be used only in case of emergency or to announce the first glimmer of radiation, whether it be material, electrical, kinetic, potential, or wave-front.
Long they listened—and then it came.
The station announcing equipment broke forth in a multitude of voices.
“Sound input on radio!”
“Visual indication on scanner plates!”
“Distortion on electrostatic field indicator!”
“Super-electroscopes indicate negative charge!”
“Nothing on the telescope!”
There were mingled cheers and laughter as the speaker system broke away from babel, and each group spoke its piece with no interference. Walt Franks left the ship at the south end and raced to the beam control dome, just as fast as the runway car would take him. He ran into the dome in spacesuit and flipped the helmet back over his shoulder.
“What kind of indication?” he yelled.
Men crowded around him, offering him papers and showing figures.
“Gosh,” he said, “Don can’t have everything going tip there.”
“He’s hit just about everything but the guy squinting through the ‘scope.”
“What’s he doing?” asked Franks of nobody in particular.
Charles Thomas, who had been busy with the electrostatic field indicator said: “I think maybe he’s using some sort of electron gun—like the one you tried first-off on the meteor destroyer job, remember?”
“Yeah, but that one wouldn’t work—unless Don has succeeded in doing something we couldn’t do. Look, Chuck, we haven’t had time to set up a complete field indicator on the ship. Grab yours and give the boys a lift installing it, hey?”
“Sure thing,” said Thomas.
“And look, fellows, any indication of direction, velocity, or distance?”
“Look for yourself,” said the man on the beam scanner. “The whole plate is shining. We can’t get a fix on them this way—they’re radiating, themselves, and that means our scanner-system finder is worthless.”
“We can, but it’s rough,” offered one of the radio men. “It came from an area out beyond Terra—and as for our readings, it might have covered a quarter of the sky.”
“The field indicator is a short-base finder,” explained Thomas. “And no less rough than the radio boys. I’d say it was out beyond Terra by fifty million miles at least.”
“Close enough. We’ll have to track ‘em down like a radio-equipped bloodhound. Chuck, come along and run that mechanico-electro-monstrosity of yours. Gene, you can come along and run the radio finder. Oh, yes, you, Jimmy, may continue to squint through that eyepiece of yours—but on the Relay Girl. We need a good, first-class squinter, and you should have an opportunity to help.”
Jimmy laughed shortly. “The only guy on the station that didn’t get an indication was me. Not even a glimmer.”
“Channing didn’t know we’d be looking for him, or he’d probably light a flare, too. Cheer up, Jimmy, after all this crude, electrical rigmarole is finished—and we gotta get right down to the last millimeter—it’s the guy with the eye that polishes up the job. You’ll have your rum.”
Twenty minutes after the first glimmer of intelligent signal, the Relay Girl lifted from the south end and darted off at an angle, setting her nose roughly in the direction of the signal.
Her holds were filled with spare batteries and a whole dozen replacement cathodes, as well as her own replacements. Her crew was filled to the eyebrows with gravanol, and there must have been a mile of adhesive tape and cotton on their abdomens. At six G she left, and at six G she ran, her crew immobilized but awake because of the gravanol. And though the acceleration was terrific, the tape kept the bodies from folding of their own weight. When they returned, they would all be in the hospital for a week, but their friends would be with them.
Ten minutes after takeoff, the signals ceased.
Walt said: “Keep her running. Don’s saving electricity. Tell me when we pick him up again.”
Franklen, the pilot, nodded. “We haven’t got a good start yet. It’ll be touch and go. According to the slipstick boys, they must be clapp
ing it up at between twenty-five hundred and five thousand miles per second to get that far—and coasting free or nearly so. Otherwise they’d have come in. Any suggestions as to course?”
“Sure. Whoop it up at six until we hit about six thousand. Then decelerate to four thousand by using one G. We’ll vacillate in velocity between four and five until we get close.”
Forty-one hours later, the Relay Girl made turnover and began to decelerate.
-
Channing said to Captain Johannson: “Better cut the decel to about a quarter G. That’ll be enough to keep our heads from bumping the ceiling, and it will last longer. This is going to be a long chase, and cutting down a few MPS at a half G isn’t going to make much never-mind. I’ll hazard a guess that the boys are on their way right now.”
“If you say so,” said Johannson. “You’re the boss from now on. You know that wild bunch on the station better than I do. For myself, I’ve always felt that an answer was desirable before we do anything.”
“I know Franks and my wife pretty well—about as well as they know me. I’ve put myself in Walt’s place—and I know what Walt would do. So, if Walt didn’t think of it, Arden would. I can assume that they are aware of us, have received our signals, and are, therefore, coming along as fast as they can. They’ll come zipping out here from five to seven G to what they think is halfway and then decelerate again to a sane velocity. We won’t catch sight of them for sixty or seventy hours, and when we do, they’ll be going so fast that it will take another twenty hours’ worth of manipulation to match their speed with ours. Meanwhile, I’ve got the gun timed to shoot our signal. When the going gets critical, I’ll cut the power and make it continuous.”
“You’re pretty sure of your timing?”
“Well, the best they can do as for direction and velocity and distance is a crude guess. They’ll place us out here beyond Terra somewhere. They’ll calculate the course requirements to get us this far in the time allotted, and come to a crude figure. I’d like to try keying this thing, but I know that keying it won’t work worth a hoot at this distance. Each bundle of keyed electrons would act as a separate negative charge that would spread out and close up at this distance. It’s tough enough to hope that the electron beam will hold together that far, let alone trying to key intelligence with it. We’ll leave well enough alone—and especially if they’re trying to get a fix on us; there’s nothing worse than trying to fix an intermittent station. Where are we now?”
“We’re on the inner fringe of the Asteroid Belt, about thirty million miles north, and heading on a secant course at thirty-four hundred MPS.”
“Too bad Jupiter isn’t in the neighborhood,” said Channing. “We’ll be flirting with his orbit by the time they catch us.”
“Easily,” Johannson said. “In sixty hours, we’ll have covered about six hundred and fifty million miles. We’ll be nearer the orbit of Saturn, in spite of the secant course.”
“Your secant approaches a radius as you get farther out,” said Don, absently. “As far as distances go, Titan, here we come!”
Johannson spoke to the doctor. “How’re we doing?”
“Pretty well,” Doc answered. “There’s as pretty an assortment of fractured limbs, broken ribs, cracked clavicles, and scars, mars, and abrasions as you ever saw. There are a number dead, worse luck, but we can’t do a thing about them. We can hold on for a week as far as food and water goes. Everyone is now interested in the manner of our rescue rather than worrying about it.” He turned to Channing. “The words Channing and Venus Equilateral have wonderful healing powers,” he said. “They all think your gang are part magician and part sorcerer.”
“Why, for goodness’ sake?”
“I didn’t ask. Once I told ‘em you had a scheme to contact the relay station, they were all satisfied that things would happen for the better.”
“Anything we can do to help you out?”
“I think not,” answered Doc. “What I said before still goes. Your job is to bring aid—and that’s the sum total of your job. Every effort must be expended on that and that alone. You’ve got too many whole people depending on you to spend one second on the hurt. That’s my job.”
“O.K.,” said Channing. “But it’s going to be a long wait.”
“We can afford it.”
“I hope we’re not complicating the job of finding us by this quartering deceleration,” said Captain Johannson.
“We’re not. We’re making a sort of vector from our course, but the deviation is very small. As long as the fellows follow our radiation, we’ll be found,” Channing said with a smile. “The thing that is tough is the fact that all the floors seem to lean over.”
“Not much, though.”
“They wouldn’t lean at all if we were running with the whole set of equipment,” said Darlange. “We run a complete turnover without spilling a drop from the swimming pool.”
“Or even making the passengers aware of it unless they’re looking at the sky.”
“Stop worrying about it,” said Doc. “I’m the only guy who has to worry about it and as long as the floor is still a floor, I can stand sliding into the corner once in a while.”
“We might tinker with the turnover drivers,” Don offered. “We can bring ‘em down to a place where the velocity-deceleration vectors are perpendicular to the floor upon which we stand while our ship is sluing. We’ve got a lot of time on our hands, and I, for one, feel a lot happier when I’m doing something.”
“It’s a thought,” said Hadley. “Wanna try it?”
“Let’s go.”
-
Thirty hours after the Relay Girl left the station, Walt and Franklen held a council of war, in which Chuck Thomas was the prime factor.
“We’ve come about two hundred million miles, and our present velocity is something like four thousand miles per second,” said Walt. “We’re going toward Mars at a slightly-off radial course, to the north of the ecliptic. That means we’re a little over a quarter of a billion miles from Sol, or about to hit the Asteroid Belt. Thinking it over a little, I think we should continue our acceleration for another thirty hours. What say?”
“The field has shown no change in intensity that I can detect,” said Thomas. “H they haven’t dropped their radiated intensity, that means that we are no closer to them than we were before. Of course, we’d probably have to cut the distance by at least half before any measurable decrement made itself evident.”
“They must be on the upper limit of that four thousand MPS,” observed Walt. “There’s one thing certain, we’ll never catch them by matching their speed.”
“Where will another thirty hours at six G put us, and how fast?” asked Franklen.
Silence ensued while they scribbled long figures on scratch paper.
“About eight hundred million miles from Sol,” Walt announced.
“And about eight thousand MPS,” added Chuck.
“That’s a little extreme, don’t you think?” Franklen asked.
“By about thirty percent,” said Walt, scratching his chin. “If we hold to our original idea of hitting it for six thousand, where will we be?”
“That would make it about forty-five hours from takeoff, and we’d be about four hundred and sixty million miles from Sol.” Chuck grinned widely and said: “By Jove!”
“What?”
“By Jove!”
” ‘By Jove!’ What?”
“That’s where we’d be—by Jove!”
“Phew!”
“I agree with you,” said Franklen to Walt. “Better ignore him.”
“Sure will after that. So then we’ll be ‘by Jove’ at six thousand. That would be a swell place to make turnover, I think. At one G decel to about four thousand MPS, that’ll put us about—urn, that’d take us about ninety hours! We’ll make that three G at twenty hours, which will put us about three hundred and fifty million miles along, which plus the original four hundred and sixty million adds up to eight hundred and ten
million—”
“When an astronaut begins to talk like that,” Arden interrupted, “we of the skyways say that he is talking in congressional figures. The shoe is on the other foot. What on earth are you fellows figuring?”
“Where we’ll be and how fast we’ll be going at a given instant of particular importance,” offered Walt. “When did you wake up?”
“About the third hundred million. All of those ciphers going by made a hollow sound, like a bullet whistling in the wind.”
“Well, we’re trying to make the theories of probability match with figures. We’ll know in about forty-five hours whether we were right or not.”
“It’s a good thing we have all space to go around in. Are you sure that we have all eternity?”
“Don’t get anxious, Arden. They’re still coming in like a ton of bricks four times per hour, which means that they’re riding easy. I don’t want to overran them at about three thousand MPS and have to spend a week decelerating, returning, more decelerating, and then matching velocities.”
“I see. You know best. And where is this Asteroid Belt that I’ve heard so much about?”
“To the south of us by a few million miles. Those bright specks that you can’t tell from stars are asteroids. The common conception of the Asteroid Belt being filled to overflowing with a collection of cosmic rubble like the rings of Saturn is a lot of hooey. We’ll be past in a little while and we haven’t even come close to one. Space is large enough for all of us, I think.”
“But not when all of us want the same space.”
“I don’t care for their area,” said Walt with a smile. “Let ‘em have it, I don’t care, I’ll stay up here and let them run as they will.”
“You mean the ones that are moving downward?” asked Arden, indicating the sky.
“Those are asteroids, yes. We’re up to the north, as you may check by going around the ship to the opposite side. You’ll see Polaris almost directly opposite, there. Sol is almost directly below us, and that bright one that you can see if you squint almost straight up is Saturn.”
“I won’t bother crossing the ship to see Polaris. I prefer the Southern Cross, anyway. The thing I’m most interested in is: are we accomplishing anything?”
Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC Page 18
