Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC

by George O. Smith

  “It’s easy to say, chum.”

  “I know it. So far, all we’ve been able to do is take energy from the solar intake beams and spray it out into space. It goes like the arrow that went—we know not where.”

  “So?”

  “Forget these gadgets. Have Chuck hook up the solar intake tubes to the spotter and replace the cathodes with pure thorium. I’ve got another idea.”

  “O.K., but it sounds foolish to me.”

  Channing laughed. “We’ll stalemate him,” he said bitterly, and explained it to Walt. Then: “I wonder when Murdoch will come this way?”

  “It’s but a matter of time,” said Walt. “My bet is, as soon as he can get here with that batch of fresh rats he’s collected.”

  -

  Walt’s bet would have collected. Two days later, Hellion Murdoch flashed a signal into Venus Equilateral and asked for Channing.

  “Hello, Hellion,” Channing answered. “Haven’t you learned to keep out of our way?”

  “Not at all,” answered Murdoch. “You won’t try that betatron on me again. This ship is coated with four-tenths of an inch of lithium metal, which according to the books will produce the maximum quantity of electrons under secondary emission. If not the absolute maximum, it is high enough to prevent your action.”

  “No,” agreed Channing. “We won’t try the betatron again. But, Murdoch, there are other things.”

  “Can they withstand these,” asked Murdoch. The turret swiveled until the triple mount of tubes looked at Venus Equilateral.

  “Might try,” said Channing.

  “Any particular place?” countered Murdoch.

  “Hit the south end. We can best afford to lose that,” answered Channing.

  “You’re either guessing, or hoping I won’t fire, or perhaps praying that whatever you have for protection will work,” said Murdoch flatly. “Otherwise you wouldn’t talk so smooth.”

  “You blackhearted baby-killing rotter,” Channing snarled. “I’m not chinning with you for the fun of it. You‘ll shoot anyway, and I want to see how good you are. Get it over with, Murdoch.”

  “What I have here is plenty good,” said Murdoch. “Good enough. Do you know about it?”

  “I can guess, but you tell me.”

  “Naturally,” said Hellion. He explained in detail. “Can you beat that?”

  “We may not be able to outfire you,” gritted Channing, “but we may be able to nullify your beam.”

  “Nonsense!” roared Murdoch. “Look, Channing, you’d best surrender.”

  “Never!”

  “You’d rather die?”

  “We’d rather fight it out. Come in and get us.”

  “Oh, no. We’ll just shoot your little station full of holes. Like the average spaceship, your station will be quite capable of handling communications even though the air is all gone. Filling us full of holes wouldn’t do a thing; you see, we’re wearing spacesuits.”

  “I guessed that No, Murdoch, we have nothing to shoot at you this time. All we can do is hold you off until you get hungry. You’ll get hungry first, since we’re self-sufficient.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime we’re going to try a few things out on your hull. I rather guess that you’ll try out a few things on the station. But at the present, you can’t harm us and we can’t harm you. Stalemate, Murdoch!”

  “You’re bluffing!” stormed Murdoch.

  “Are you afraid to squirt that beam this way?” asked Channing tauntingly. “Or do you know it will not work?”

  “Why are you so anxious to get killed?”

  “We’re very practical, out here on Venus Equilateral,” said Don. “There’s no use in our working further if you have something that is really good. We’d like to know our chances before we expend more effort along another line.”

  “That’s not all—?”

  “No. Frankly, I’m almost certain that your beam won’t do a thing to Venus Equilateral.”

  “We’ll see. Listen! Turretman! Are you ready?” Faintly the reply came, and Channing could hear it.

  “Ready!”

  “Then fire all three. Pick your targets at will. One blast!”

  The light in Venus Equilateral brightened. The thousands of line-voltage meters went from one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and forty volts, and the line frequency struggled with the crystal control and succeeded in making a ragged increase from sixty to sixty point one five cycles per second. The power-output meters on the transmitting equipment went up briefly, and in the few remaining battery supply rooms, the overload and overcharge alarms clanged until the automatic adjusters justified the input against the constant load. One of the ten-kilowatt modulator tubes flashed over in the audio room and was immediately cut from the operating circuit; the recording meters indicated that the tube had gone west forty-seven hours prior to its expiration date, due to filament overload. A series of fluorescent lighting fixtures in a corridor of the station that should have been dark because of the working hours of that section flickered into life and woke several of the workers, and down in the laboratory Wes Farrell swore because the fluctuating line had disrupted one of his experiments, giving him reason to doubt the result. He tore the thing down, and began once more; seventy days’ work had been ruined.

  “Well,” Channing said cockily, “is that the best you can do?”

  “You!”

  “You forgot,” reminded Channing, “that we have been working with solar power, too. In fact, we discovered the means to get it. Go ahead and shoot at us, Murdoch. You’re just giving us more power.”

  “Cease firing!” Murdoch exploded.

  “Oh, don’t,” cheered Don. “You forgot that those tubes, if aligned properly, will actually cause bending of the energy beam. We’ve got load-terminal tubes pointing at you, and your power beam is bending to enter them. You did well, though. You were running the whole station with plenty to spare. We had to squirt some excess into space. Your beams aren’t worth the glass that’s in them!”

  “Stalemate, then,” snarled Murdoch. “Now you come and get us. We’ll leave. But we’ll be back. Meanwhile, we can have our way with the shipping. Pilot! Course for Mars! Start when ready!”

  The Black Widow turned and streaked from Venus Equilateral as Don Channing mopped his forehead. “Walt,” he said, “that’s once I was scared to death.”

  “Me, too. Well, we got a respite. Now what?”

  “We start thinking.”

  “Right. But of what?”

  “Ways and—Hello, Wes. What’s the matter?”

  Farrell entered and said: “They broke up my job. I had to set it up again, and I’m temporarily free. Anything I can do to help?”

  “Can you dream up a space gun?”

  Farrell laughed. “That’s problematical. Energy guns are something strange. Their output can be trapped and used to good advantage. What you need is some sort of projectile, I think.”

  “But what kind of projectile would do damage to a spaceship?”

  “Obviously the normal kinds are useless. Fragmentation shells would pelt the exterior of the hull with metallic rain—if and providing you could get them that close. Armor-piercing would work, possibly, but their damage would be negligible since hitting a spacecraft with a shell is impossible if the ship is moving at anything at all like the usual velocities. Detonation shells are a waste of energy, since there is not atmosphere to expand and contract. They’d blossom like roses and do as much damage as a tossed rose.”

  “No projectiles, then.”

  “If you could build a super-heavy fragmentation and detonation shell, and combine it with armor-piercing qualities, and could hit the ship, you might be able to stop them. You’d have to pierce the ship, and have the thing explode with a terrific blast. It would crack the ship because of the atmosphere trapped in the hull—and should be fast enough to exceed the compressibility of air. Also, it should happen so fast that the air leaving the hole made
would not have a chance to decrease the pressure. The detonation would crack the ship, and the fragmentation would mess up the insides to boot, giving two possibilities. But if both failed and the ship became airless, they would fear no more detonation shells. Fragments would always be dangerous, however.”

  “So now we must devise some sort of shell—”

  “More than that. The meteor circuits would intercept the incoming shell and it would never get there. What you’d need is a few hundred pounds of ‘window’. You know, strips of tin foil cut to roughly a quarter-wavelength of the meteor detecting radar. That’ll completely foul up his directors and drive couplers. Then the big one, coming in at terrific velocity.”

  “And speaking of velocity,” said Walt Franks, “the projectile and the rifle are out. We can get better velocity with a constant-acceleration drive. I say torpedoes!”

  “Naturally. But the aiming? Remember, even though we crank up the drive to fifty G, it takes time to get to several thousand miles per second. The integration of a course would be hard enough, but add to it the desire of men to evade torpedoes—and the aiming job is impossible.”

  “We may be able to aim them with a device similar to the one Chuck Thomas is working with. Murdoch said his hull was made with lithium?”

  “Coated with,” Channing corrected.

  “Well. Set the alloy-selectivity disk to pure lithium, and use the output to steer the torpedo right down to the bitter end.”

  “Fine. Now the armor-piercing qualities.”

  “Can we drill?”

  “Nope. At those velocities, impact would cause detonation, the combined velocities would look like a detonation wave to the explosive. After all, damn few explosives can stand shock waves that propagate through them at a few thousand miles per second.”

  “O.K. How do we drill?”

  “We might drill electrically,” suggested Farrell. “Put a beam in front?”

  “Not a chance,” said Channing. “The next time we meet up with Hellion Murdoch, he’ll have absorbers ready for use. We taught him that one, and Murdoch is not slow to learn.”

  “So how do we drill?”

  “Wes, is that non-arcing alloy of yours very conductive?”

  “Slightly better than aluminum.”

  “Then I’ve got it! We mount two electrodes of the non-arcing alloy in front. Make ‘em heavy and of monstrous current-carrying capacity. Then we connect them to a condenser made of Farrell’s super-dooper dielectric.”

  “You bet,” said Walt, grinning. “We put a ten-microfarad condenser in front, only it’ll be one hundred and thirty farads when we soak it in Farrell’s super-dielectric. We charge it to ten thousand volts, and let it go.”

  “We’ve got a few experimental jobs,” said Channing. “Those inerts. The drones we were using for experimental purposes. They were radio-controlled, and can be easily converted to the aiming circuits.”

  “Explosives?”

  “We’ll get the chemistry boys to brew us a batch.”

  “Hm-m-m. Remind me to quit Saturday,” said Walt. “I wonder how a ten-farad condenser would drive one of those miniatures …”

  “Pretty well, I should imagine. Why?”

  “Why not mount one of the miniatures on a gunstock and put a ten-farad condenser in the handle. Make a nice side arm.”

  “Good for one shot, and not permanently charged. You’d have to cut your leakage down plenty.”

  “Could be. Well, we’ll work on that one afterward. Let’s get that drone fixed.”

  “Let’s fix up all the drones we have. And we’ll have the boys load up as many as they can of the little message canisters with the windows. The whole works go at once with the same acceleration, with the little ones running interference for the big boy.”

  “Murdoch invited us to ‘come and get him,” said Channing in a hard voice. “That, I think we’ll do!”

  -

  Four smoldering derelicts lay in absolute wreckage on or near the four great spaceports of the Solar System. Shipping was at an unequaled standstill, and the communications beams were loaded with argument and recriminations and pleas as needed material did not arrive as per agreement. Three ships paid out one dollar each gross ton in order to take vital merchandise to needy parties, but the mine run of shipping was unable to justify the terrific cost.

  And then Don Channing had a long talk with Keg Johnson of Interplanetary Transport.

  One day later, one of Interplanetary’s larger ships took off from Canalopsis without having paid tribute to Murdoch. It went free—completely automatic—into the Martian sky and right into Murdoch’s hands. The pirate gunned it into a molten mass and hurled his demands at the system once more, then left for Venus, since another ship would be taking off from there.

  In the Relay Girl, Don Channing smiled. “That finds Murdoch,” he told Walt. “He’s on the standard course for Venus from Mars.”

  “Bright thinking,” commented Walt. “Bait him on Mars and then offer him a bite at Venus. When’ll we catch him?”

  “He’s running, or will be, at about three G, I guess. We’re roaring along at five and will pass Mars at better than four thousand miles per second. I think we’ll catch and pass the Black Widow at the quarter-point, and Murdoch will be going at about nine hundred miles per. We’ll zoom past, and set the finder on him, and then continue until we’re safely away. If he gets tough, we’ll absorb his output. Though he’s stepped it up to the point where a spacecraft can’t take too much concentrated input.”

  “That’s how he’s been able to blast those who went out with absorbers?”

  “Right. The stuff on the station was adequate to protect, but an ordinary ship couldn’t handle it unless the ship were designed to absorb and dissipate that energy. The beam tubes would occupy the entire ship, leaving no place for cargo. Result: a toss-up between paying off and not carrying enough to make up the difference.”

  “This is Freddie,” spoke the communicator. “The celestial globe has just come up with a target at eight hundred thousand miles.”

  “O.K., Freddie. That must be the Black Widow. How’ll we pass her?”

  “About thirty thousand miles.”

  “Then get the finders set on that lithium-coated hull as we pass.”

  “Hold it,” said Walt. “Our velocity with respect to his is about three thousand. We can be certain of the ship by checking the finder response on the lithium coating. If so, she’s the Black Widow. Right from here, we can be assured. Jimmy! Check the finders in the torpedoes on that target!”

  “Did,” said Jimmy. “They’re on and it is.”

  “Launch ‘em all!” yelled Franks.

  “Are you nuts?” asked Channing.

  “Why give him a chance to guess what’s happening? Launch ‘em!”

  “Freddie, drop two of the torpedoes and half the window. Send ‘em out at ten G. We’ll not put all our eggs in one basket,” Channing said to Walt. “There might be a slipup. It’ll sort of spoil the effect,” said Don. “But we’re not here for effect.”

  “What effect?”

  “That explosive will be as useless as a slab of soap,” Don explained. “Explosive depends for its action upon velocity—brother, there ain’t no explosive built that will propagate at the velocity of our torpedo against Murdoch.”

  “I know,” said Franks, smiling.

  “Shall I yell ‘Bombs away” in a dramatic voice?” asked Freddie Thomas.

  “Are they?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then yell,” grinned Walt. “Look, Don, this should be pretty. Let’s hike to the star-camera above and watch. We can use the double-telescope finder and take pix, too.”

  “It won’t be long,” said Channing grimly. “And we’ll be safe, since the interferes will keep Murdoch’s gadget so busy he won’t have time to worry us. Let’s go.”

  -

  The sky above became filled with myriad flashing spots as the rapidly working meteor spotters coupled to the big
turret and began to punch at the interferers.

  The clangor of the alarm made Murdoch curse. He looked at the celestial globe and his heart knew real fear for the first time. This was no meteor shower, he knew from the random pattern. Something was after him, and Murdoch knew who and what it was. He cursed Channing and Venus Equilateral in a loud voice.

  It did no good, that cursing. Above his head, the triply mounted turret danced back and forth, freeing a triple needle of Sol’s energy. At each pause another bit of tin foil went out in a blaze of fire. And as the turret destroyed the little dancing motes, more came speeding into range to replace them, ten to one.

  And then it happened. The finder circuit fell into mechanical indecision as two of the canisters of window burst at angles, each with the same intensity. The integrators ground together, and the forces they loosed struggled for control.

  Beset by opposing impulses, the amplidyne in the turret stuttered, smoked, and then went out in a pungent stream of yellowish smoke that poured from its dust cover in a high-velocity stream. The dancing of the turret stopped, and the flashing motes in the sky stopped with the turret’s death.

  One hundred and thirty farads, charged to ten thousand volts, touched the lithium-coated, aluminum side of Murdoch’s Black Widow. Thirteen billion joules of electrical energy, thirty-six hundred kilowatt hours went against two inches of aluminum. At the three-thousand-miles-per-second relative velocity of the torpedo, contact was immediate and perfect. The aluminum hull vaporized under the million upon million of kilovolt-amperes of the discharge. The vaporized hull tried to explode, but was hit by the unthinkable velocity of the torpedo’s warhead.

  The torpedo itself crushed in front. It mushroomed under the millions of degrees Kelvin developed by the energy release caused by the cessation of velocity, for at this velocity the atmosphere within the Black Widow was as immobile and as hard as tungsten steel at its best.

  The very molecules themselves could not move fast enough. They crushed together and in compressing brought incandescence.

  The energy of the incoming torpedo raced through the Black Widow in a velocity wave that blasted the ship itself into incandescence. In a steep wave front, the vaporized ship exploded in space like a super-nova.