Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC

by George O. Smith

  “Is she aligned?” asked the project engineer.

  “Right on the button.”

  “Good. We can’t miss with this one. There may have been something sour with the rest, but this one ran Venus Equilateral—the whole relay station—for ten days without interruption.”

  He faced fee anxious men in overcoats. “Here we go,” he said, and his hand closed upon the switch that transferred the big tube from test power to operating power.

  The engineer closed the switch, and stepped over to the great, vaned, air-cooled ammeter shunt on a panel just beyond the shunt the meter hung—

  At Zero!

  “Um,” said the project engineer. “Something wrong, no doubt.”

  They checked every connection, every possible item in the circuit. “Nothing wrong!”

  “Oh, now look,” said the engineer. “This isn’t Hell, where the equipment is always perfect except that it doesn’t work.”

  “This is Hell,” announced his assistant. “The thing is perfect—except that it doesn’t work.”

  “It worked on Venus Equilateral.”

  “We’ve changed nothing, and we handled that gadget like it was made of cello-gel. We’re running the same kind of voltage, checked on standard voltmeters. We’re within one-tenth of one percent of the original operating conditions. But—no power.”

  “Call Channing.”

  The beams between Terra and Venus Equilateral carried furious messages for several hours. Channing’s answer said:

  -

  I’M CURIOUS. AM BRINGING THE EXPERIMENTAL SHIP TO TERRA TO INVESTIGATE.

  -

  The assistant asked: “Isn’t that the job they hooked up to use the solar power for their drive?”

  The project engineer: “That’s it. And it worked.”

  “I know. I took a run on it!”

  Channing was taking a chance, running the Relay Girl to Terra, but he knew his ship, and he was no man to be overcautious. He drove it to Terra at three G and by dead reckoning, started down into Terra’s blanket of air, heading for the Terran Electric plant which was situated on the lake shore.

  Then down out of the cloudless sky came the Relay Girl in a free fall. It screamed with the whistle of tortured air as it fell, and it caught the attention of every man who was working at Terran Electric.

  Only those on the roof saw the egg-shaped hull fall out of the sky unchecked, landing fifteen hundred yards offshore in Lake Michigan.

  The splash was terrific.

  “Channing—!” said the project engineer, aghast.

  “No, look there—a lifeship!”

  Cautiously gliding down, a minute lifeship less than the size of a freight car came to a landing in the Terran Electric construction yard. Channing emerged, his face white. He bent down and kissed the steel grille of the construction yard fervently.

  Someone ran out and gave Channing a brown bottle. Don nodded, and took a draw of monstrous proportions. He gagged, made a face, and smiled in a very wan manner.

  “Thanks,” he said shakily. He took another drink, of more gentlemanly size.

  “What happened?”

  “Dunno. Was coming in at three G. About four hundred miles up, the deceleration just quit. Like that! I made it to the skeeter, here, in just about enough time to get her away with about two miles to go. Whoosh!”

  Don dug into his pocket and found cigarettes. He lit up and drew deeply. “Something cockeyed, here. That stoppage might make me think that my tube failed; but—”

  “You suspect that our tube isn’t working for the same reason?” finished the project engineer.

  “Yes. I’m thinking of the trick, ultra-high powered, concentric beams we have to use to ram a hole through the Heaviside Layer. We start out with three million watts of sheer radio frequency and end up with just enough to make our receivers worth listening to. Suppose this had some sort of Heaviside Layer?”

  “In which case, Terran Electric hasn’t got solar power,” said the project engineer. “Tim, load this bottle into the Electric Lady, and we’ll see if we can find this barrier.” To Channing, he said: “You look as though you could stand a rest. Check into a hotel in Chicago and we’ll call you when we’re ready to try it out.”

  Channing agreed.

  A shave, a bath, and a good night’s sleep did wonders for his nerves, as did a large amount of Scotch. He was at Terran Electric in the morning, once more in command of himself.

  Up into the sky went the ship that carried the solar tube. It remained inert until the ship passed above three hundred and forty miles. Then the ammeter needle swung over, and the huge shunt grew warm. The tenuous atmosphere outside of the ship was unchanged, yet the beam drew power of gigantic proportions.

  They dropped again. The power ceased.

  They spent hours rising and falling, charting this unknown barrier that stopped the unknown radiation from bringing solar power right down to earth. It was there, all right, and impervious. Above, megawatts raced through the giant shunt. Below, not even a microammeter could detect a trace of current.

  “O.K., Don,” said the project engineer. “We’ll have to do some more work on it. It’s nothing of your doing.”

  Mark Kingman’s face was green again, but he nodded in agreement. “We seem to have a useless job here, but we’ll think of something.”

  They studied the barrier and established its height as a constant three hundred and thirty-nine point seven six miles above Terra’s mythical sea level. It was almost a perfect sphere, that did not change with the night and day, as did the Heaviside Layer. There was no way to find out how thick it was, but thickness was of no importance, since it effectively stopped the beam.

  Then as Don Channing stepped aboard the Princess of the Sky to get home again, the project engineer said: “If you don’t mind, I think we’ll call that one the Channing Layer!”

  “Yeah,” grinned Don, pleased at the thought, “and forever afterward it will stand as a cinder in the eye of Terran Electric.”

  “Oh,” said the project engineer, “we’ll beat the Channing Layer.”

  But the project engineer was a bum prophet.

  -

  Interlude

  Baffled and beaten, Mark Kingman returned to Terran Electric empty-handed. He hated science and the men who reveled in it, though he was not above using science—and the men who reveled in it—to further his own unscientific existence. The poetic justice that piled blow upon blow on his unprotected head was lost on Mark Kingman and he swore eternal vengeance.

  With a say in the operations at Terran Electric, Kingman directed that the engineers and scientists work furiously to discover something about this strange radiation that made the energy beam possible, that drove spacecraft across the void, and which was now drawing power out of the sun to feed the requirements of men who owed allegiance to Venus Equilateral.

  Kingman was losing his sense of values. He accused Venus Equilateral of trickery—quietly, of course, for people had faith in the operations of the relay station personnel and would stand for no criticism. Because people found Venus Equilateral and all that went with it both good and upstanding in the face of what Mark Kingman believed, it infuriated him to the point of illegality.

  And the evil fate that makes evil men appear to flourish smiled upon Mark Kingman, while all that Channing had to fight back with was his faith in the unchanging physical laws of science.

  But Kingman thought he was smart enough to beat Venus Equilateral at its own business!

  -

  Beam Pirate

  Mark Kingman was in a fine state of nerves. He looked upon life and the people in it as one views the dark-brown taste of a hangover. It seemed to him at the present time that the Lord had forsaken him, for the entire and complete success of the solar beam had been left to Venus Equilateral by a sheer fluke of nature.

  Neither he, nor anyone else, could have foreseen the Channing Layer, that effectively blocked any attempt to pierce it with the strange, sub-le
vel energy spectrum over which the driver tube and the power-transmission tube worked, representing the so-called extremes of the spectrum.

  But Venus Equilateral, for their part, was well set. Ships plied the spaceways, using their self-contained power only during atmospheric passage, and paid Venus Equilateral well for the privilege. The relay station itself was powered on the solar beam. There were other relay stations that belonged to the Interplanetary Communications Company: Luna, Deimos, and Phobos, and the six that circled Venus in lieu of a satellite—all were powered by the solar beam. The solar observatory became the sole income for Terran Electric’s planetary rights of the solar beam, since Mercury owned no air of its own.

  Kingman was beginning to feel the brunt of Channing’s statement to the effect that legal-minded men were of little importance when it came to the technical life in space, where men’s lives and livelihood depended more on technical skill than upon the legal pattern set for their protection in the complex society of planetary civilization.

  He swore vengeance.

  So, like the man who doggedly makes the same mistake twice in a row, Kingman was going to move Heaven, Hell, and three planets in an effort to take a swing at the same jaw that bad caught his fist between its teeth before.

  Out through the window of his office, he saw men toiling with the big tube on the far roof; the self-same tube that had carried the terrific load of Venus Equilateral for ten days without interruption and with no apparent overload. Here on Terra, its output meter, operating through a dummy load, showed not the slightest inclination to leave the bottom peg and seek a home among the higher brackets.

  So Kingman cursed and hated himself for having backed himself into trouble. But Kingman was not a complete fool. He was a brilliant attorney, and his record has placed him in the position of Chief Attorney for Terran Electric, which was a place of no mean importance. He had been licked on the other fellow’s ground, with the other fellow’s tools.

  He picked up papers that carried, side by side, the relative assets of Venus Equilateral and Terran Electric. He studied them and thought deeply.

  To his scrutiny, the figures seemed about equal, though perhaps Venus Equilateral was a bit ahead.

  But, he had been licked on the other fellow’s ground with the other fellow’s weapons. He thought that if he fought on his own ground with his own tools he might be able to swing the deal.

  Terran Electric was not without a modicum of experience in the tools of the other fellow. Terran Electric’s engineering department was brilliant and efficient, too; at least the equal of Channing and Franks and their gang of laughing gadgeteers. That not only gave him the edge of having his own tools and his own ground, but a bit of the other fellow’s instruments, too. Certainly his engineering department should be able to think of something good.

  -

  William Cartwright, business manager for Venus Equilateral, interrupted Don and Walt in a discussion. He carried a page of stock market quotations and a few hundred feet of ticker tape.

  Channing put down his pencil and leaned back in his chair. Walt did likewise, and said: “What’s brewing?”

  “Something I do not like.”

  “So?”

  “The stock has been cutting didoes. We’ve been up and down so much it looks like a scenic railway.”

  “How do we come out?”

  “Even, mostly; but from my experience, I would say that some bird is playing hooky with Venus Equilateral, Preferred. The common is even worse.”

  “Look bad?”

  “Not too good. It is more than possible that some guy with money and the desire might be able to hook a large slice of VE, Preferred. I don’t think they could get control, but they could garner a plurality from stock outstanding on the planets. Most of the preferred stock is in the possession of the folks out here, you know, but aside from yourself, Walt, and a couple dozen of the executive personnel, the stock is spread pretty thin. The common stock has a lot of itself running around loose outside. Look!”

  Cartwright began to run off the many yards of ticker tape. “Here some guy dumped a boatload at Canalopsis, and some other guy glommed on to a large hunk at New York. The Northern Landing Exchange showed a bit of irregularity during the couple of hours of tinkering, and the irregularity was increased because some bright guy took advantage of it and sold short” He reeled off a few yards and then said: “Next, we have the opposite tale. Stuff was dumped at Northern Landing, and there was a wild flurry of bulling at Canalopsis. The Terran Exchange was just flopping up and down in a general upheaval, with the boys selling at the top and buying at the bottom. That makes money, you know, and if you can make the market tick your way—I mean control enough stuff—your purchases at the bottom send the market up a few points, and then you dump it and it drops again. It wouldn’t take more than a point or two to make a guy rich, if you had enough stock and could continue to make the market vacillate.”

  “That’s so,” agreed Don. “Look, Bill, why don’t we get some of our Terran agents to tinkering, too? Get one of our best men to try to outguess the market. As long as it is being done systematically, he should be able to follow the other guy’s thinking. That’s the best we can do unless we go Gestapo and start listening in on all the stuff that goes through the station here.”

  “Would that help?”

  “Yeah, but we’d all land in the hoosegow for breaking the secrecy legislation. You know. ‘No one shall … intercept … transmit … eavesdrop upon … any message not intended for the listener, and … shall not … be party to the use of any information gained … et cetera.’ That’s us. The trouble is this lag between the worlds. They can prearrange their bulling and bearing ahead of time and play smart. With a tittle trick, they can get the three markets working just so—going up at Northern Landing, down at Terra, and up again at Canalopsis—Just tike waves in a rope. By playing fast and loose on paper, they can really run things hell, west, and crooked, mega!, probably, since they each no doubt will claim to have all the stock in their possession, and yet will be able to sell and buy the same stock at the same time in three places.”

  “Sounds slightly precarious to me,” Cartwright objected.

  “Not at all, if you figure things just right. At a given instant, Pete may be buying at sixty-five on Venus; Joe might be selling like furious at seventy-one on Mars; and Jim may be bucking him up again by buying at sixty-five on Terra. Then the picture and the tickers catch up with one another, and Joe will start buying again at sixty-five, while Pete and Jim are selling at seventy-one. Once they get their periodicity running, they’re able to tinker the market for quite a time. That’s where your man comes in, Bill. Have him study the market and step in at the right time and grab us all a few cheap ones. Get me?”

  “Sure,” said Cartwright. “I get it. In that way, we’ll tend to stabilize the market, as well as getting the other guy’s shares.”

  “Right I’ll leave it up to you. Handle this thing for the best interest of all of us.”

  Cartwright smiled once again, and left with a thoughtful expression on his face. Channing picked up the miniature of the power-transmission tube and studied it as though the interruption had not occurred. “We’ll have to use about four of these per stage,” he said/ “We’ll have to use an input terminal tube to accept the stuff from the previous stage, drop it across the low-resistance load, resistance-couple the stage to another output terminal tube where we can make use of the coupling circuits without feedback. From there into the next tube, with the high-resistance load, and out of the power-putter-outer tube across the desk and to the next four-bottle stage.”

  “That’s getting complicated,” said Walt. “Four tubes per stage of amplification.”

  “Sure. As the arts and sciences get more advanced, things tend to get more complicated.”

  “That’s essentially correct,” Walt agreed with a smile. “But you’re foreguessing. We haven’t even got a detector that will detect driver radiation.”
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br />   “I know, and perhaps this thing will not work. But after all, we’ve got the tubes and we might just as well try them out, just in case. We’ll detect driver radiation soon enough, and then we might as well have a few odd thoughts on how to amplify it for public use. Nothing could tickle me more than to increase those three circles on our letterhead to four. Planet to Planet, and Ship to Ship is our hope. This one-way business is not to my liking. How much easier it would have been if I’d been able to squirt a call in to the station when I was floating out there beyond Jupiter in that wrecked ship. That gave me to think, Walt. Driver radiation detection is the answer.”

  “How so?”

  “We’ll use the detector to direct our radio beam, and the ship can have a similar gadget coupled to its beam, detecting a pair of drivers set at one hundred and eighty degrees from one another so the thrust won’t upset the station’s celestial alignment. We can point one of them at the ship’s course, even, making it easier for them.”

  “Speaking of direction,” said Walt thoughtfully, “have you figured why the solar beam is always pointing behind Sol?”

  “I haven’t given that much thought I’ve always thought that it was due to the alignment plates not being in linear perfection, so that the power beam bends. They can make the thing turn a perfect right angle, you know.”

  “Well, I’ve been toying with the resurrected heap you dropped into Lake Michigan a couple of months ago, and I’ve got a good one for you. You know how the beam seems to lock into place when we’ve got it turned to Sol—not enough to make it certain, but more than detectably directive?”

  “Yep. We could toss out the motor control that keeps her face turned to the sun.”

  “That’s what I was hoping to gain—” Walt started, but he stopped as the door opened and Arden entered, followed by a man and woman.

  “Hello,” said Walt in a tone of admiration.

  “This is Jim Baler and his sister Christine,” said Arden. “Baler, the guy with the worried look on his face is my legally wedded souse—no, spouse. And the guy with the boudoir-gorilla gleam in his vulpine eyes is that old vulture, Walt Franks.”