He did not notice that every very personal thing had been removed from Channing’s office. Frankly, Kingman did not care. He had had everything his own way.
The senior officer spoke. “You need us anymore, Mr. Kingman?”
“No,” replied the new owner of Venus Equilateral.
“Then we’ll return to duty on Terra,” said the officer.
Channing went back to the party and spent ten minutes telling his friends what had happened. Then he forgot about it and joined in the merrymaking, which was growing more boisterous and uninhibited by the moment. It was in the wee small hours of the clock—though not necessarily the night, for there is no such thing on Venus Equilateral—when the party broke up and people bundled up and braved the howling blizzard that raged up and down the halls.
Home to warmth and cheer—and bed.
-
Arden sat up in bed and looked sleepily around the dark bedroom. “Don,” she asked with some concern, “you’re not sick?”
“Nope,” he replied.
Arden pursed her lips. She snapped the light on and saw that Don was half dressed.
“What gives?” she demanded, slipping out of bed and reaching for a robe.
“Frankly—”
“You’ve been stewing over that blown-out fuse.”
He nodded sheepishly.
“I knew it. Why?”
“Those tubes have been running on a maintenance load for days. They shouldn’t blow out.”
“Critter of habit, aren’t you?” Arden grinned.
Don nodded. “A consuming curiosity, I guess.”
Arden smiled as she continued to climb into her clothing. “You’re not the only one in this family who has a lump of curiosity,” she told him.
“But it’s—”
“Don,” said his wife seriously, “rules is rules and electricity and energy are things I’m none too clear on. But I do know my husband. And when he gets up out of a warm bed in the middle of the night to go roaming through a frozen world, it’s urgent. And since the man in question has been married to me for a number of years, getting up out of a warm bed and going out into snow and ice means that the urgency angle is directed at whatever lies at the other end. I want to go see—and I’m going to!”
Channing nodded absently. “Probably a wild-goose chase,” he said. “Ready?”
Arden nodded. “Lead on, curious one.”
Channing blinked when he saw the light in the room where the solar intake tubes were. He hastened forward to find Wes Farrell making some complex measurements and juggling a large page of equations.
Farrell looked up and grinned sheepishly. “Couldn’t sleep,” he explained. “Wanted to do just one more job, I guess.”
Channing nodded silently.
Arden said: “Don’t kid anybody. Both of you want to know why a fuse should blow on a dead line.”
Farrell grinned and Channing nodded again. “I—” Don started, but turned as the door opened.
“Thought we’d find you here,” said Barney Carroll. Jim Baler added: “We got to arguing as to how and why a fuse should blow on an empty line and decided to ask you.”
Arden squinted at Jim. “Did it ever occur to you that we might have been in bed?”
Barney grinned. “I figured if we were awake from wondering about it, so would you-all. So—”
Jim interrupted. “So what have you found?”
Channing shook his head. “Ask Wes,” he said. “He got here first and was measuring the deflecting electrode voltages when I arrived. I note that he has a hunk of copper busbar across the main fuse terminals.” Wes smiled sheepishly. “Had to,” he said. “Short was really shorted!”
“So what have you found?” Farrell pointed to a place on a chart of the station. “About here.”
“Spinach!” said Channing. “There isn’t anything there!”
Farrell handed the figures to Don. “That’s where the short-circuit load is coming from,” he said.
“Up there,” said Channing, “I’ll bet it’s hitting close to seventy or eighty degrees below zero. A supercold condition—” He paused and shook his head. “The tube room reached absolute zero some time ago,” he said, “and there’s no heavy drain to that position.”
“Well?” demanded Arden, yawning. “Do we wait until tomorrow morning or go up there now?”
Channing thought for a moment. “We’re due to leave in the morning,” he said. “Yet I think that the question of why anything up in an empty section of Venus Equilateral should be blowing fuses would belabor us all of our lives if we didn’t make this last screwball search. Let’s go. Wes, get your portable sun finder, huh?”
“His what?” Arden asked.
“Figger of speech, sweet. We mean a small portable relay tube that we can stick in series with his gawd-awful drain and use for a direction finder. I have no intention of trying to scour every storeroom in that area for that which I don’t really believe is there.”
-
The main deterrent to swift action was the bitter, bitter cold that stabbed at their faces and hands, which were not enclosed in the electrically heated suits—of which each one of them wore three against the ultra-violent chill.
“There should be a door here,” objected Don, reading a blueprint from the large roll he carried under his arm. “Fact is, this series of rooms seems to have been sealed off entirely though the blueprint calls for a door, about here!”
“How would anybody re-seal a doorway?” asked Barney.
“Duplicator,” Don said thoughtfully. “And I smell rats!”
“So. And how do we get in?” demanded Arden.
“We break in,” said Channing harshly. “Come along, gang. We’re going back downstairs to get us a cutter!”
The cutter consisted of a single-focus scanner beam that Don wielded like an acetylene torch. Clean and silently it cut through the metal wall and the section fell inward with a slight crash.
They stepped in through the opening.
“Someone has been homesteading,” said Channing in a gritty voice. “Nice prefab home, hey? Let’s add house-breaking to our other crimes. I’d like to singe the heels off the character that did this. And I think I’ll let the main one simmer.”
“Who?” asked Arden.
Channing pointed to the huge energy tube at one end of the room. It bore the imprint of Terran Electric.
“Kingman,” he said drily.
Applying his cutter to the wall of the cottage, he burned his way through. “No one living here,” he said. “Colder than Pluto in here, too. Look, Wes, here’s your short circuit. Tubes from—”
“And here,” said Farrell quickly, “are your missing chums!”
Channing came over to stand beside Farrell, looking down at the too-still forms. Baler looked at Channing with a puzzled glance, and Channing shook his head quietly.
Then he said: “I may be wrong, but it strikes me that Walt and Christine interrupted skullduggery at work and were trapped as a consequence. No man, no matter how insane, would ever enter a trap like this willingly. This is neither a love nest nor a honeymoon cottage, Jim. This is a death trap!”
Channing turned from the place and left on a dead run. He paused at the door to the huge room and yelled: “Don’t touch ‘em till I get Doc!”
-
By the clock, Christmas Day dawned bright and clear. The strip fluorescents came on in the corridors of Venus Equilateral and there began the inexorable flow of people toward the south end landing stage.
Each man or woman carried a small bag. In this were the several uniques he or she possessed and a complete set of recordings on the rest of his personal possessions. Moving was as easy as that—and once they reached Terra, everything they owned could be reproduced at will. It was both glad and sad, the thrill of a new experience to come balancing the loss of the comfortable routine of the old. Friends, however, managed to get aboard the same spacecraft as a general rule and so the pain of parting was spared th
em.
One by one, the huge ships dropped south and then headed for Terra. One by one, until the three thousand-odd people who lived on, loved, and operated Venus Equilateral through its working years had embarked.
Channing shook hands with Captain Johannson as he got aboard the last remaining ship. Behind Channing came Keg Johnson, who supervised the carrying aboard of Walt Franks and Christine Baler. They were seated side by side in deck chairs on the operating bridge of the spacecraft and Arden came up to stand beside her husband as she asked: “Captain Johannson, you are empowered to perform matrimony?”
Johannson nodded.
“Well,” she said, “I’m the matron of honor and this husband of mine intends to be best man. We agree that the couple there have spent too much time living with one another—”
“If she says ‘sin’ I’ll strangle her,” groaned Walt.
Christine reached over and took her hand. “She doesn’t dare,” she said. “She knows it was ah—er—colder than sin!”
Big Jim Baler clenched and unclenched his hands. “I still think we should have called on Mark Kingman,” he said in a growl.
Channing shook his head. “And spoil the ‘fine end of a fine holiday? Nope. And also spoil a fine bit of retribution?”
Linna Johnson smiled. “A man of action like Jim finds the finer points of retribution a bit too smooth,” she said. “But it’ll be plenty rough on Kingman.”
“To the devil with Kingman,” said Barney Carroll. “I say we ought to commit this ceremony at once and then repair to the bar—or have the bar repair here—and have a last drink to Venus Equilateral.”
Walt Franks stood up. “I’m still stiff,” he said. “But I‘ll be damned if I’m going to sit down at my own wedding,”
Christine stood beside him. “You’re thinking about that ‘repair to the bar’ and don’t want to get left,” she told him. “Well, frozen solid or not, I’m sticking tight.”
Johannson turned to the pilot and gave the order. . The big ship dropped from the platform and they all looked down through the glass dome at the diminishing view of Venus Equilateral.
The captain turned to Channing and asked: “Just what did happen to Mark Kingman?”
“Mark has mortgaged his everlasting black soul to the hilt to maintain communications under the standard franchise. For a period of five years, Mark must live on that damned station alone in the cold and the loneliness, maintaining once each day a relay contact, or lose his shirt. And because he dropped the Relay Girl into the sun when he planned that ‘elopement,’ we’ve just confiscated his ship. That leaves Kingman aboard a practically frozen relay station with neither the means to get away nor the ability to handle the situation at all. He must stay, because when he puts a foot on any planet we clap him in jail for kidnapping. He’s lost his financial shirt because Venus Equilateral is an obsolete commodity and he’ll never regain enough of his personal financial standing to fight such a case. If I were Mark Kingman, about now I’d—”
Channing shook his head, leaving the sentence unfinished. He turned to Walt. “Got a ring handy?”
Wes Farrell held up a greenish metal ring that glinted iridescent colors. “Y’might try this new synthetic,” he offered.
Walt shook his head. He fumbled in an inner pocket and came up with a small band that was very plain. “This is a certified unique,” he said proudly. “It was my mother’s, and grandmother’s, too.”
Then, with Venus Equilateral still visible in the port below and a whole sky above, Captain Johannson opened his book and started to read. Behind them was work and fun and pain, and before them—
Was the exciting, unchartered future.
-
Interlude
Twenty-seven years have passed since Don Channing and his merry men invented Venus Equilateral out of a job, and closed the relay station after one last bash. The matter transmitter, which turned out to be a matter duplicator as well, not only brought chaos to the economy, but brought to conclusion the communications industry as an interplanetary business. It also made “work” a nasty, four-letter word.
But if one expects chaos to last indefinitely in the face of plenty, one does not understand human nature. For the household duplicator and its file of recordings became a way of life. So, with its belly filled, its back clothed, and its person housed, the human race cast about for new mountains to climb, new follies to indulge, new mischief to get into, and new happiness to pursue. New problems arose. When the maw of the home duplicator needed only to be filled with rubbish when its owner wanted something, it is true that the trash piles were recycled, but it is also true that backyards and the landscape began to look like strip mines.
Ecology, this time in favor of beauty, arose and pointed a bony finger to Outer Space where there was plenty of rubbish—that could be converted as easily into hot water, warm air, and rich topsail as it was to manufacture bricks, gold, or transactinide elements. So, with the duplicator to provide and maintain a habitable environment, the satellites of the Outer Planets, and Pluto itself, were Terra-converted and colonized.
-
The External Triangle
Some miles south of Bifrost Bridge, which spans the River Styx between the twin cities of Mephisto and Hell, on the newly transformed and settled Pluto, there is an island some acres in area. Upon it is a gracious house, flanked on one side by a low building that is obviously a workshop, and on the other side by the tall and unmistakable form of an aging spacecraft, the Relay Girl II, a replacement after Mark Kingman’s destruction of the original at the closing of Venus Equilateral Relay Station.
The house belongs to Don and Arden Channing.
The years have been fairly kind to Don. He retains most of his teeth and his hair, and by a combination of luck and good management he has avoided that malady euphemistically called “Falling arches of the chest.” His hair is gray, but he is cheerful. But if the years have been kind to Don, they have been even more so to Arden. Hers is the beauty of maturity, assisted by more than a quarter of a century of a well-mated marriage and the secure knowledge that their daughter appears to be facing a repetition.
The unmistakable sound of a jet-helicopter making an approach caught Arden’s attention, but not Don’s, for he was at his usual task of drawing diagrams on a pad of quadrille paper (Arden had cured him of using the tablecloth) and discarding them in disgust. She caught his attention by saying, “We seem to have company.”
He looked at the ‘copter. “That ain’t company, that’s the whole damn Franks family.”
First out, while the blades were still awhirl, came Jeffrey Franks, followed by Diane Franks, and Channing. They raced for the house, leaving Walt and Christine to follow.
The years have been kind to Walt Franks, but the combination of Christine’s cooking and his own nature have contributed to a spare tire which, in combination with a rotund face and a bald scalp, make him resemble a Santa Claus during the off-duty season. He climbed out slowly, then paused to assist his wife, whose main change in the passing years has been hair turned ashen. Neither of them were inclined to make a mad dash; they sauntered slowly toward the Channing home, hand in hand.
Diane Franks burst in first. “It’s true!” she cried. “Confirmed.”
Don Channing looked up at her. “You’ll simply have to put a stop to it. I’m much too young to be a grandfather.”
“The facts say otherwise,” said his wife.
“I’ll leave home.”
“Running out isn’t going to change anything. Why not get used to the idea? Then when it happens, it won’t be such a shock.”
Walt came in with Christine. The three women immediately clustered together.
Don eyeballed Walt and said, “Do you realize what your son has been doing to my daughter?”
“All very legal,” asserted Walt. “Been going on in the Franks family ever since a couple of amoebae named Frank and Francine climbed out of the primordial swamp and decided to try fusion instead of
fission. How does the Channing Tribe increase?”
“Telepathy,” said Don, “modified by some ground rules to include hand-holding and an occasional peck on the cheek.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Walt chuckled. “So, okay—break out the champagne, gran’pa.”
“Don’t call me gran’pa!” yelped Don.
“If I can take it so can you,” Walt laughed.
Don turned and called to Jeffrey Franks, “You young despoiler of my daughter’s virtue, go run the special recording, kept for special occasions, through the duplicator. Your father thinks champagne is in order.”
Arden looked at him. “Gee,” she said. “We thought you’d never ask.”
Jeffrey exited willingly upon his errand, and as he left, Walt looked down at some of the drawings strewn around Don’s chair. “What’s all this, Don?”
“Puzzle I’ve been working on for some time.”
“Puzzle? What’s it about?”
“Something that has been bugging me for quite a while. Way back when we invented us out of the economic mess that we had duplicated ourselves into, why, that old bigmouth Keg Johnson told me that the matter transmitter we’d invented wasn’t that at all. We scan a solid, send a signal analog of the thing, particle by particle, then reconstitute it at the receiving end. That’s why we can record the signal and make a million duplicates. Keg wants something that will transmit a certified ‘unique’ and keep it certifiable as a unique, since it will be the same object—not a faithful replica.”
“Some problem,” Walt said, his eyes going out of focus as he mused over it.
Jeffrey returned with the champagne bucket and, after expertly twirling the bottle, he as efficiently extracted the cork and topped up glasses all around, the ladies included.
Handing out the glasses, Jeffrey paused to look at the diagram as Don proposed a toast to the imminent, and inescapable, event.
After the first polite sip, Jeffrey said, “I hate to sound rash, but—er—you—er—were all born too early.”
“Meaning what?” demanded his father.
“Well, Dad, you and Mr. Channing were running Venus Equilateral on vacuum tubes. Thermionic devices. Power klystrons and wide-band traveling wave tubes, and things like that. Why, you didn’t even know about parametric amplifiers.”
Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC Page 45
