Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC

by George O. Smith

  So Kingman went back to his stock market machinations and applied himself diligently. And as the days wore on, Kingman’s group manipulated their watered stock and ran the price up and down at will, and after each cycle Kingman’s outfit owned just one more bit of Venus Equilateral.

  Terran Electric would emerge from this battle with Venus Equilateral as a subsidiary—with Kingman at the helm!

  -

  Walt Franks, entered Channing’s office with a wild-eyed look on his face. “Don! C2!”

  “Huh! What are you driving about?”

  “C2. The speed of light, squared!”

  “Fast—but what is it?”

  “The solar beam! It propagates at C2!”

  “Oh, now look. Nothing can travel that fast!”

  “Maybe this isn’t something!”

  “It has energy, energy has mass, mass cannot travel faster than the limiting speed of light.”

  “O.K. It can’t do it. But unless my measurements are all haywire, the beam gets to Sol and back at C2. I can prove it.”

  “Yeah? How? You couldn’t possibly measure an interval so small as two times sixty-seven million miles—the radius of Venus’ orbit—traversed at the speed of light, squared.”

  “No. I admit that. But, Don, I got power out of Sirius!”

  “You WHAT?” yelled Channing.

  “Got power out of Sirius. And unless I’ve forgotten how to use a microclock, it figured out from here to Sirius and back with the bacon in just about ninety-three percent of the speed of light, squared. Seven percent is well within the experimental error, I think, since we think of Sirius as being eight and one-half light-years away. That’s probably not too accurate as a matter of fact, but if s the figure I used. But here we are. Power from Sirius at C2. Thirty-five billion miles per second! This stuff doesn’t care how many laws it breaks!”

  “Hm-m-m. C2, hey? Oh, lovely. Look, Walt, let’s ran up and take a whirl at Wes Farrell‘s detector. I’m beginning to envision person-to-person, ship-to-ship service, and possibly the first Interplanet Network. Imagine hearing a play-by-play account of the Solar Series!”

  “Wool-gathering,” Walt snorted. “We’ve gotta catch our detector first!”

  “Wes has something. First glimmer we’ve had. I think this is the time to rush it with all eight feet and start pushing!”

  “O.K. Who do we want?”

  “Same gang as usual. Chuck and Freddie Thomas, Warren, Wes Farrell, of course, and you can get Jim Baler into it, too. No, Walt, Christine Baler is not the kind of people you haul into a screwdriver meeting.”

  “I was merely thinking.”

  “I know. But you’re needed, and if she were around, you’d be a total loss as far as cerebration.”

  “I like her.”

  “So does Barney Carroll.”

  “Um! But he isn’t here. O.K., no Christine in our conference. I’ll have Jeanne call the screwballs on the communicator.”

  They dribbled into Farrell’s laboratory one by one, and then Don said: “We have a detector. It is about as efficient as a slab of marble; only more so. We can get a tinkle of about ten micro-microamps at twenty feet distance from a driver tube using eight KVA input, which if we rate this in the usual spaceship efficiency, comes to about one-half G. That’s about standard, for driver tubes, since they run four to a ship at two G total.

  “Now, that is peanuts. We should be able to wind a megammeter around the peg at twenty feet. Why, the red ionization comes out of the tube and hits our so-called detector, and the amount of ozone it creates is terrific. Yet we can’t get a good reading out of it” Walt asked: “Wes, what worked, finally?”

  “A four-turn coil on a ceramic form, in series with a twenty micro-microfarad tuning condenser. I’ve been using a circular plate as a collector.”

  “Does it tune?”

  “Nope. Funny thing, though, it won’t work without a condenser in the circuit. I can use anything at all there without tuning it. But, damn it, the coil is the only one that works.”

  “That’s slightly ridiculous. Have you reconstructed all factors?”

  “Inductance, distributed capacity, and factor ‘Q’ are all right on the button with two more I made. Nothing dioding.”

  “Hm-m-m. This takes the cake. Nothing works, you say?”

  “Nothing in my mind. I’ve tried about three hundred similar coils, and not a wiggle since. That’s the only one.”

  Chuck Thomas said: “Wes, have you tried your tube-amplifier system ahead of it?”

  “Yes, and nothing at all happens then. I don’t understand that one, because we know that any kind of input power will be re-beamed as similar power. I should think that the thing will amplify the same kind of stuff. I’ve used a solar beam miniature with a driver-alloy dynode in it, but that doesn’t work either.”

  “Shucks,” said Thomas.

  Don stood up and picked up the coil. “Fellows, I’m going to make a grand old college try.”

  “Yes?” asked Walt.

  “I’ve got a grand idea, here. One, I’m still remembering that business of making the receptor dynode of the same alloy as the transmitter cathode. I’ve a hunch that this thing is not so much an inductor, but something sour in the way of alloy selectivity. If I’m right, I may cut this in half, and make two detectors, each of similar characteristics. Shall I?”

  “Go ahead. We’ve established the fact that it is not the physico-electrical characteristics of that coil,” said Wes. “I, too, took my chances and rewound that same wire on a couple of other forms. So it doesn’t count as for as inductance goes. So we can’t ruin anything but the total makeup of the wire. I think we may be able to re-establish the wire by self-welding if your idea doesn’t work. Now, unless we want to search the three planets for another hunk of wire to work like this one did, without knowing what to look for and therefore trying every foot of wire on three planets—”

  “I’ll cut it,” said Channing with a smile.

  His cutters snipped, and then fastened one end of the wire to the coil, stripping the other portion off and handing it to Chuck Thomas, who rewound it on another form.

  “Now,” Don said, “crank up your outfit and we’ll try this hunk.”

  The beam tubes were fired up, and the smell of ozone began to make itself prominent. Channing cranked up the air-vent capacity to remove the ozone more swiftly. The men applied themselves to the detector circuits, and Wes, who recognized the results, said: “This hunk works. About as good as the whole coil.”

  Channing replaced the first coil with the second. Wes inspected the results and said: “Not quite as good, but it does work.”

  Walt nodded, and said: “Maybe it should be incandescent.”

  “That’s a thought. Our solar beam uses an incandescent dynode.” Channing removed the second coil and handed it to Freddie. “Take this thing down to the metallurgical lab and tell ‘em to analyze it right down to the trace of sodium that seems to be in everything. I want quantitative figures on every element in it. Also, cut off a hunk and see if the crystallographic expert can detect anything peculiar that would make this hunk of copper wire different from any other hunk. Follow?”

  “Yep,” said Freddie. “We’ll also start making similar alloys with a few percent variation on the composition metals. Right?”

  “That’s the ticket. Wes, can we evacuate a tube with this wire in it and make it incandescent?”

  “Let’s evacuate the room. I like that stunt.”

  “You’re the engineer on this trick. Do it your way.”

  “Thanks. I get the program, all right. Why not have Chuck build us a modulator for the driver tube? Then when we get this thing perfected, we’ll have some way to test it.”

  “Can do, Chuck?”

  “I think so. It’s easy. We’ll just modulate the cathode current of the electron guns that bombard the big cathode. That is the way we adjust for drive; it should work as a means of amplitude modulation.”

  “O.K
.,” said Channing. “We’re on the rails for this one. We’ll get together as soon as our various laboratories have their answers and have something further to work with,”

  -

  Above Venus, Mark Kingman was listening to the wailing roar of alien symphony and cursing because he could hardly hear the voice of his Lunar accomplice saying: “VE, Preferred, just hit one hundred and two!”

  Fifteen minutes before the peak hit Northern Landing, share after share was being dumped, and in addition, a message was on its way back to Terra. It went on the regular beam transmission through Venus Equilateral, carefully coded. It said:

  -

  HAVE SUFFICIENT STOCK AND ADDITIONAL COLLATERAL TO APPLY THE FIRST PRESSURE. APPLY PHASE TWO OF PLAN.

  KINGMAN.

  -

  In the ten hours that followed, Venus Equilateral stock went down and down, passed through a deep valley, and started up again. Kingman’s crowd was offering twice the market for the preferred stock, and there was little to have. It took a short-time dip at three hundred, and the few minutes of decline smoked a lot of stock out of the hands of people who looked upon this chance as the right time to make their money and get out.

  Then the stock began to climb again, and those people who thought that the price had been at its peak and passed were angrily trying to buy in again. That accelerated the climb, but Kingman’s crowd, operating on Venus and on Mars and on Terra, were buying only, and selling not one share of Venus Equilateral.

  Terran Electric stock took a gradual slide, for Kingman’s crowd needed additional money. But the slide was slow, and controlled, and manipulated only for the purpose of selling short. Terran Electric stock eventually remained in the hands of Kingman’s crowd, though its value was lessened.

  Venus Equilateral, Preferred, hit four hundred and sixty-eight, and hovered. It vacillated around that point for another hour, and the market closed at four hundred and sixty-nine and three-eighths.

  Kingman looked at his watch and smiled. He reached forth and cut the dinning sound of the cacophony with a vicious twist of the gain knob. Silence reigned in the spaceship; grand, peaceful silence. Kingman, his nerves frayed by the mental activity and the brain-addling music-from-nowhere, took a hot shower and went to bed.

  He locked the panel of the control room first, however. He wanted no engineer tinkering with his pet relay.

  -

  Cartwright came into Channing’s living room with a long face. “It’s bad,” he said. “Bad.”

  “What’s bad?”

  “Oh, I, like the rest of the fools, got caught in his trap.”

  “Whose trap?”

  “The wild man who is trying to rock Venus Equilateral on its axis.”

  “Well, how?”

  “They started to buy like mad, and I held out. Then the thing dropped a few points, and I tried to make a bit of profit, so that we could go on bolstering the market. They grabbed off my stock, and then, just like that! the market was on the way up again and I couldn’t find more than a few odd shares to buy back.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Channing, “I don’t think anyone is big enough to really damage us. Someone is playing fast and loose, making a killing. When this is over, we’ll still be in business.”

  “I know, Don, but whose business will it be? Ours, or theirs?”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “I’m afraid so. One more flurry like today, and they’ll be able to tow Venus Equilateral out and make Mars Equilateral out of it, and we won’t be able to say a word,”

  “Hm-m-m. You aren’t beaten?”

  “Not until the last drop. I’m not bragging when I say that I’m as good an operator as the next. My trouble today was not being a mind reader. I’d been doing all right, so far. I’ve been letting them ride it up and down with little opposition, and taking off a few here and there as I rode along. Guessing their purpose, I could count on their next move. But this banging the market sky-high has me stumped, or had me stumped for just long enough for me to throw our shirt into the ring. They took that quick—our shirt, I mean.”

  “That’s too bad. What are you leading up to?”

  “There are a lot of unstable stocks that a guy could really play hob with; therefore their only reason to pick on us is to gain control!”

  “Pirates?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well,” Channing said in a resigned voice, “about all we can do is do our best and hope we are smart enough to outguess ‘em. That’s your job, Cartwright. A long time ago Venus Equilateral made their decision concerning the executive branch of this company, and they elected to run the joint with technical men. The business aspects and all are under the control of men who know what they are fighting. We hire businessmen, just like businessmen hire engineers, and for the opposite purpose. You’re the best we could get, you know that.

  If those guys get Venus Equilateral, they‘ll get you, too. But if you do your best and fail, we can’t shoot you in the back for it. We’ll all go down together. So keep pitching, and remember that we’re behind you all the way!”

  “Can we float a bit of a loan?”

  “Sure, if it’s needed. I’d prefer Interplanetary Transport. Keg Johnson will do business with us. We’ve been in the way of helping them out of a couple of million-dollar losses; they might be anxious to reciprocate.”

  “O.K. I have your power of attorney, anyway. If I get in a real crack, I’ll scream for IT to help. Right?”

  “Right!”

  Cartwright left, and as he closed the door, Channing’s face took on a deep, long look. He was worried. He put his head between his hands and thought himself into a tight circle from which he could not escape. He did not hear Walt Franks enter behind Arden and Christine.

  “Hey!” said Walt. “Why the gloom? I bear glad tidings!”

  Channing looked up. “Spill,” he said with a glum smile. “I could use some glad tidings right now.”

  “The lab just reported that the hunk of copper wire was impure. Got a couple of traces of other metals in it. They’ve been concocting other samples with more and less of the impurities, and Wes has been trying them as they were ready. We’ve got the detector working to the point where Freddie has taken the Relay Girl out for a run around the station at about five hundred miles and Wes is still getting responses!”

  “Is he? How can he know?”

  “Chuck rigged the Relay Girl‘s drivers with a voice modulator, and Freddie is jerking his head off because the acceleration is directly proportional to the amplitude of his voice, saying: ‘One, two, three, four, test’ Don, have you ever figured out why an engineer can’t count above four?”

  “Walt, does it take a lot of soup to modulate a driver?” Arden asked.

  “Peanuts,” grinned Franks. “This stuff is not like the good old radio; the power for driving the spaceship is derived mostly from the total disintegration of the cathode, and the voltage applied to the various electrodes is merely for the purpose of setting up the proper field conditions. They draw quite a bit of current, but nothing like that which would be required to lift a spaceship at two G for a hundred hours flat” He turned to Channing. “What’s the gloom?”

  Don smiled in a thoughtful fashion. “It doesn’t look so good right now. Some gang of stock market cutthroats have been playing football with Venus Equilateral, and Cartwright says he is sure they want control. It’s bad; he’s been clipped a couple of hard licks, but we’re still pitching. The thing I’m wondering right now is this: shall we toss this possibility of person-to-person and ship-to-ship communication just at the right turn of the market to bollix up their machinations, or shall we keep it to ourselves and start up another company with this as our basis?”

  “Can we screw ‘em up by announcing it?”

  “Sure. If we drop this idea just at the time they’re trying to run the stock down, it’ll cross over and take a run up, which will set ‘em on their ear.”

  “I don’t know. Better k
eep it to ourselves for a bit. Something may turn up. But come on down to Wes’ lab and give a look at our new setup.”

  Channing stood up and stretched. “I’m on the way,” he said.

  Farrell was working furiously on the detector device, and as they entered he indicated the meter that was jumping up and down. Out of a speaker was coming the full, rich tones of Freddie Thomas’ voice, announcing solemnly: “One, two, three, four, test.”

  Wes said, “I’m getting better. Chuck has been bettering his modulator now, and the detector is three notches closer to whatever this level of energy uses for resonance. Evacuation and the subsequent incandescence was the answer. Another thing I’ve found is this—” Farrell held up a flat disk about six inches in diameter with one saw cut from edge to center. “As you see, the color of this disk changes from this end of the cut, varying all the way around the disk to the other side of the cut. The darned disk is a varying alloy—I’ve discovered how to tune the driver radiation through a limited range. We hit resonance of the Relay Girl‘s driver system just off the end of this disk. But watch while I turn the one in the set.”

  Farrell took a large knob and turned it. Freddie’s voice faded, and became toneless. Farrell returned the knob to its original position and the reception cleared again.

  “Inside of that tube there,” said Farrell, “I have a selsyn turning the disk, and a small induction loop that heats the whole disk to incandescence. A brush makes contact with the edge of the disk and the axle makes the center connection. Apparently this stuff passes on a direct line right through the metal, for it works.”

  “Have you tried any kind of tube amplification?” asked Don.

  “Not yet. Shall we?”

  “Why not? I can still think that the relay tube will amplify if we hook up the input and output loads correctly.”

  “I’ve got a tube already hooked up,” said Walt. “It’s mounted in a panel with the proper voltage supplies and so on. If your resistance calculation is correct, we should get about three thousand times’ amplification out of it.”

  He left, and returned in a few minutes with the tube. They busied themselves with the connections, and then Don applied the power.