“Can we try it?”
“As soon as I get Terran Electric’s permission.”
“Here we go again!” groaned Walt.
“Yeah,” said Don to Barney, “now you‘ll see the kind of birds you sold your gadget to.”
-
They found Kingman and Farrell in conference. Channing offered his suggestion immediately, and Kingman looked it over, shaking his head.
“It is not permitted to alter, change, rework, or repair tubes owned by Terran Electric,” he said.
“What are we permitted to do?” asked Channing.
“Give me your recommendation and I shall have the shop at Terran Electric perform the operation.”
“At cost?”
“Cost plus a slight profit. Terran Electric, just as Venus Equilateral, is not in business from an altruistic standpoint.”
“I see.”
“Also,” said Kingman severely, “I noticed one of your men changing the circuit slightly without permission. Why?”
“Who was it?”
“The man known as Thomas.”
“Charles Thomas is in charge of development work,” said Channing. “He probably noted some slight effect that he wanted to check.”
“He should have notified me first—I don’t care how minute the change. I must pass on changes first.”
“But you wouldn’t know their worth,” Barney objected.
“No, but Mr. Farrell does, and will so advise me.”
Wes looked at Channing. “Have you been to the ninth level yet?”
“Nope,” said Channing.
“May I accompany you?”
Channing looked at Farrell critically. The Terran Electric engineer seemed sincere, and the pained expression on his face looked like frustrated sympathy to Don.
“Come along,” he said.
-
Barney smiled cheerfully at the sign on Joe’s door.
“That’s a good one, ‘Best Bar in Twenty-seven Million Miles, Minimum!’ What’s the qualification for?”
“That’s as close as Terra ever gets. Most of the time the nearest bar is at Northern Landing, Venus; sixty-seven million miles from here. Come on in and we’ll get plastered.”
Farrell said, “Look, fellows, I know how you feel. They didn’t tell me that you weren’t going to be given permission to work. I understood that I was to sort of walk along, offer suggestions, and sort of prepare myself to take over some research myself. This is sickening.”
“I think you mean that.”
“May I use your telephone? I want to resign.”
“Wait a minute. If you’re that sincere, why don’t we outguess ‘em?”
“Could do,” said Wes. “But how?”
“Is there any reason why we couldn’t take a poke to Sol himself?”
“You mean haul power out of the sun?”
“That’s the general idea. Barney, what do you think?”
“Could do—but it would take a redesign.”
“Fine. And may we pray that the redesign is good enough to make a difference to the Interplanetary Patent Office.” Channing called Joe. “The same. Three Moons all around. Scotch,” he explained to the others, “synthesized in the Palanortis Country.”
“Our favorite import,” said Walt.
Joe grinned. “Another tablecloth session in progress?”
“Could be. As soon as we oil the think tank, we’ll know for sure.”
“What does he mean?” asked Barney.
Joe smiled. “They all have laboratories and draftsmen and textbooks,” he said. “But for real engineering, they use my tablecloths. Three more problems and I’ll have a complete tablecloth course in astrophysics, with a sideline in cartooning and a minor degree in mechanical engineering.”
“Oh?”
“Sure. Give ‘em a free hand, and a couple of your tubes and a tablecloth, and they’ll have ‘em frying eggs by morning. When I came out here, they demanded a commercial bond and I thought they were nuts. Who ever heard of making a restaurateur post a bond? I discovered that all of their inventions are initially tinkered out right here in the dining room—I could steal ‘em blind if I were dishonest!” Joe smiled hugely. “This is the only place in the System where the tablecloths have been through blueprint machines. That,” he said confidentially to Barney, “is why some of the stuff is slightly garbled. Scotch mixed with the drawings. They have the cloths inspected by the engineering department before they’re laundered; I lose a lot of tablecloths that way.”
Joe left cheerfully amid laughter.
The Three Moons came next, and then Don began to sketch. “Suppose we make a driver tube like this,” he said. “And we couple the top end, where the cathode is, to the input side of the relay tube. Only the input side will require a variable-impedance anode, coupled back from the cathode to limit the input to the required value. Then the coupling anodes must be served with an automatic-coupling circuit so that the limiting power is passed without wastage.”
Barney pulled out a pencil. “If you make that automatic-coupling circuit dependent upon the output from the terminal ends,” he said, “it will accept only the amount of input that is required by the power being used from the output. Overcooling these two anodes will inhibit the power intake.”
“Right,” said Wes. “And I am of the opinion that the power available from Sol is of a magnitude that will permit operation over and above the limit.”
“Four million tons of energy per second!” Walt exploded. “That’s playing with fire!”
“You bet. We’ll fix ‘em with that!”
“Our experience with relay tubes,” said Farrell slowly, “indicates that some increase in range is possible with additional anode focusing. Build your tube top with an extra set of anodes, and that’ll give us better control of the beam.”
“We’re getting farther and farther from the subject of communications,” said Channing with a smile. “But I think that we’ll get more of this.”
“How so?”
“Until we get a chance to tinker with those tubes, we won’t get ship-to-ship two ways. So we’ll gadgeteer up something that will make Terran Electric foam at the mouth, and swap a hunk of it for full freedom in our investigations. Or should we bust Terran Electric wholeheartedly?”
“Let’s slug ‘em,” said Walt.
“Go ahead,” said Wes. “I’m utterly disgusted, though I think our trouble is due to the management of Terran Electric. They like legal tangles too much.”
“We’ll give ‘em a legal tangle,” said Barney. He was adding circuits to the tablecloth sketch.
Channing, on his side, was sketching in some equations, and Walt was working out some mechanical details. Joe came over, looked at the tablecloth, and forthright went to the telephone and called Warren.
The mechanical designer came, and Channing looked up in surprise. “Hi,” he said, “I was just about to call you.”
“Joe did.”
“O.K. Look, Warren, can you fake up a gadget like this?”
Warren looked the thing over. “Give me about ten hours,” he said. “We’ve got a spare turnover drive from the Relay Girl that we can hand-carve. There are a couple of water boilers that we can strip, cut open, and make to serve as the top end. How’re you hoping to maintain the vacuum?”
“Yes,” said Wes Farrell, “that’s going to be the problem. If there’s any adjusting of electrodes to do, this’ll take months.”
“That’s why we, on Venus Equilateral, are ahead of the whole dingbusted Solar System in tube development,” said Don. “We’ll run the thing out in the open—and I do mean open! Instead of the tube having the insides exhausted, the operators will have their envelopes served with fresh, canned air.”
“Like a cartoon I saw somewhere,” grinned Walt. “Had a bird in full armor tinkering with a radio set. The caption was: ‘Why shield the set?’ “
“Phooey,” said Warren. “Look, Tom Swift, is this another of Franks’ brainchildre
n?”
“Tom Swift?” asked Wes.
“Yeah. That’s the nom de plume he invents under. The other guy we call Captain Lightning.”
“Oh?” asked Farrell. “Do you read him, too?”
“Sure,” Warren grinned. “And say, speaking of comics, I came upon an old, old volume of Webster’s International Dictionary in a rare-edition library in Chicago a couple of months ago, and they define “comic” as amusing, funny, and ludicrous; not imaginative fiction. How things change.”
“They do.”
“But to get back to this Goldberg, what is it?”
“Warren,” said Channing soberly, “sit down!” Warren did. “Now,” said Channing, “this screwball gadget is an idea whereby we hope to draw power out of the sun.”
Warren swallowed once, and then waved for Joe. “Double,” he told the restaurateur. Then to the others he said, “Thanks for seating me. I’m ill, I think. Hearing things. I could swear I heard someone say that this thing is to take power from Sol.”
“That’s it.”
“Um-m-m. Remind me to quit Saturday. This is no job for a man beset by hallucinations.”
“You grinning idiot, we’re not fooling!”
“Then you’d better quit,” Warren told Don. “This is no job for a bird with delusions of grandeur, either. Look, Don, you’ll want this in the experimental blister at south end? On a coupler to the beam turret, so that it’ll maintain direction at Sol?”
“Right, couple it to the rotating stage if you can. Remember, that’s three miles from south end.”
“We’ve still got a few high-power selsyns,” said Warren, making some notations of his own on the tablecloth. “And thanks to the guys who laid out this station some years ago, we’ve plenty of unused circuits from one end to the other. We’ll couple it, all right. Oh, Mother. Seems to me like you got a long way off of your intended subject. Didn’t you start out to make a detector for driver radiation?”
“Yep.”
“And you end up tapping the sun. D’ye think it’ll ever replace the horse?”
“Could be. Might even replace the coal mine. That’s to be seen. Have you any idea of how long you’ll be?”
“Make it ten hours. I’ll get the whole crew on it at once.”
“Fine.”
“But look. What’s the reason for this change in program?”
“That’s easy,” said Don. “First, we had a jam session. Second, we’ve come to the conclusion that the longest way ‘round is the shortest way home. We’re now in the throes of building something with which to dazzle the bright-minded management of Terran Electric and thus make them susceptible to our charm. We want a free hand at the transmission tubes, and this looks like a fair bit of bait.”
“I get it. Quote: ‘Why buy power from Terran Electric? Hang a Channing Power Beam on your chimney pot and tap the sun!’ Whoa, Mazie. Bring on the needle, Watson. Hang out the flags, fire the cannon, ring the bells; for Venus Equilateral is about to hang a pipeline right into four million tons of energy per second! Don, that’s a right smart bit of power to doodle with. Can you handle it?”
“Sure,” said Channing with a wave of his hand, “we’ll hang a fuse in the line!”
“O.K.,” said Warren sweeping the tablecloth off the table like Mysto, the Magician, right out from under the glasses. “I’ll be back—wearing my asbestos pants!”
Wes Farrell looked dreamily at the ceiling. “This is a screwy joint,” he said idly. “What do we do for the next ten hours?”
“Red herring stuff,” said Channing with what he hoped was a Machiavellian leer.
“Such as?”
“Making wise moves with the transmission tubes. Glomming the barrister’s desk with proposed ideas for his approval; as many as we can think of, so that he’ll be kept busy. We might even think of something that may work, meanwhile. Come, fellow conspirators, to horse!” Channing picked up his glass and drained it, making a wry face. “Rotten stuff—I wish I had a barrel of it!”
Channing surveyed the setup in the blister. He inspected it carefully, as did the others. When he spoke, his voice came through the helmet receivers with a slightly tinny sound: “Anything wrong? Looks O.K. to me.”
“O.K. by me, too,” said Farrell.
“Working in suit is not the best,” said Don. “Barney, you’re the bright-eyed lad. Can you align the plates?”
“I think so,” came the muffled booming of Barney’s powerful voice. “Gimme a screwdriver!”
Barney fiddled with the plate controls for several minutes. “She’s running on dead-center alignment, now,” he announced.
“Question,” put in Wes, “do we get power immediately, or must we wait while the beam gets there and returns?”
“You must run your power line before you get power,” said Walt. “My money is on the wait.”
“Don’t crack your anode-coupling circuit till then,” warned Wes. “We don’t know a thing about this; I’d prefer to let it in easy-like, instead of opening the gate and letting the whole four million tons per second come tearing in through this ammeter!”
“Might be a little warm having Sol in here with us,” laughed Claiming. “This is once in my life when we don’t need a milliammeter, but a million-ammeter!”
“Shall we assign a pseudonym for it?” chuckled Walt.
“Let’s wait until we see how it works.”
The minutes passed slowly, and then Wes announced: “She should be here. Check your anode coupler, Barney.”
Barney advanced the dial gingerly. The air that could have grown tense was, of course, not present in the blister. But the term is just a figure of speech, and therefore it may be proper to say that the air grew tense. Fact is, it was the nerves of the men that grew tense. Higher and higher went the dial, and still the meter stayed inert against the zero-end pin.
“Not a wiggle,” said Barney in disgust. He twisted the dial all the way around and snorted. The meter left the zero pin ever so slightly.
Channing turned the switch that increased the sensitivity of the meter until the needle stood halfway up the scale.
“Solar power, here we come,” he said in a dry voice. “One-half ampere at seven volts! Three and one-half watts. Bring on your atom smashers. Bring on your power-consuming factory districts. Hang the whole load of Central United States on the wires, for we have three and one-half watts! Just enough to run an electric clock!”
“But would it keep time?” asked Barney. “Is the frequency right?”
“Nope—but we’d run it. Look, fellows, when anyone tells you about this, insist that we got thirty-five hundred milliwatts on our first try. It sounds bigger.”
“O.K., so we’re getting from Sol just about three-tenths of the soup we need to make the setup self-sustaining,” said Walt. “Wes, this in-phase anode of yours—what can we do with it?”
“If this thing worked, I was going to suggest that there is enough power out there to spare. We could possibly modulate the in-phase anode with anything we wanted, and there would be enough junk floating round in the photosphere to slam on through.”
“Maybe it is that lack of selectivity that licks us now,” said Don. “Run the voltage up and down a bit. There should be DC running around in Sol, too.”
“Whatever this power level is running at,” said Barney, “we may get in-phase voltage—or in-phase power by running a line from the power terminal back. Moreover, boys, I’m going to hang a test clip in here.”
Barney’s gloved hands fumbled a bit, but the clip was attached. He opened the anode counter once again, and the meter slammed against the full-scale peg.
“See?” he said triumphantly.
“Yep,” said Channing cryptically. “You, Bernard, have doubled our input.”
“Mind if I take a whack at aligning it?” Wes asked.
“Go ahead. What we need is a guy with eyes in his fingertips. Have you?”
“No, but I’d like to try.”
Farrell work
ed with the deflection plate alignment, and then said, ruefully: “No dice. Barney had it right on the beam.”
“Is she aligned with Sol?” asked Channing.
Walt squinted down the tube. “Couldn’t be better,” he said, blinking.
“Could it be that we’re actually missing Sol?” Don asked. “I mean, could it be that line-of-sight and line-of-power aren’t one and the same thing?”
“Could be,” Wes acknowledged.
Walt stepped to the verniers and swung the big intake tube over a minute arc. The meter jumped once more, and Channing stepped the sensitivity down again. Walt fiddled until the meter read maximum and then he left the tube that way.
“Coming up,” said Channing. “We’ve now four times our original try. We now have enough juice to run an electric train—toy size! Someone think of something else, please. I’ve had my idea for the day.”
“Let’s juggle electrode spacing,” suggested Wes.
“Can do,” said Walt, brandishing a huge spanner wrench in one gloved hand.
Four solid, futile hours later, the power output of the solar beam was still standing at a terrifying fourteen watts. Channing was scratching furiously on a pad of paper with a large pencil; Walt was trying voltage variations on the supply anodes in a desultory manner; Barney was measuring the electrode spacing with a huge vernier rule; and Wes was staring at the sun, dimmed to seeable brightness by a set of dark glasses.
Wes was muttering to himself. “Electrode voltages, O.K. … alignment perfect … solar power output … not like power-line electricity … solar composition … Russell’s Mixture—”
“Whoooo said that!” roared Channing.
“Who said what?” asked Barney.
“Why bust our eardrums?” Walt objected.
“What do you mean?” asked Wes, coming to life for the moment.
“Something about Russell’s Mixture. Who said that?”
“I did. Why?”
“Look, Wes, what are your cathodes made of?”
“Thorium, CP metal. That’s why they’re shipped in metal containers in a vacuum.”
Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC Page 21
