Complete Venus Equilateral (1976) SSC

by George O. Smith

  “So?”

  “Look,” said Jeffrey, “back in those olden days, when you started to design some doodad, you went out and got tubes and resistors and capacitors and all sorts of junk. You actually built fiipflops, and/or gates and monostable multivibrators. You’re still thinking that way.”

  Don shook his head. “I’m afraid so. We dogs are both too old to be taught a lot of new tricks. So, you tell us what you are thinking about.”

  “Well, the advent of the solid-state device opened up a whole new concept. The old electron tube was as crude as opening an oyster with a hammer. But once the semiconductor came in, quantum mechanics stuck its nose in the tent like the proverbial camel, and like the camel it took over the tent. Now, let’s review what we know about the tunnel diode.”

  “You tell us.”

  “Well, sir, Werner Heisenberg once pointed out that under some circumstances the exact position of the electron can be determined, but not its energy, and under other conditions the exact energy can be measured, but then its position becomes uncertain. Between these extremes, the laws of probability take over, and if the conditions are right, one can assume with some degree of confidence that the electron has as probable a chance of existing on the mythical planet of Aldebaran as it has of being in this living room.

  “In the runnel diode,” he went on, “there is the interface between the two terminals, and for some small distance across this interface there is a so-called forbidden gap, in which the electron cannot exist. But bias the tunnel diode properly, and the electrons will slyly disappear from one side and reappear on the other—as if they’d passed through a tunnel—hence the name. In other words, there is a flow of current across the gap.”

  “And you’re suggesting that if this can take place with electrons, we ought to make out with heavier stuff?”

  “Yes.”

  Don eyed his son-in-law with amusement. “There is a lot of your old man in you, Jeff. No man but a Franks could cross the credibility gap by leaping from a harebrained idea to a foregone conclusion.”

  Christine Franks looked at Arden and pointed at the men. “I think we’ve lost our husbands for another session.”

  “Not for a while,” replied Arden. “They’re still babbling about it. We can enjoy their company through the first phase, which always begins with the old hackneyed phrase ‘Let us repair to the bar,’ where there are always new tablecloths and nice black pencils.”

  -

  The first operation, once the tablecloth session closed, was a bit of hardware-building in the workshop. This produced a large model of the tunnel diode—which is usually quite small—made with the terminals movable and constructed of coupled crystals.

  Now, the undoing of Venus Equilateral as a communications relay had been the coupled-crystal effect. With the matter duplicator, exactly identical replicas of anything could be produced. By the philosophy of Einsteinian reasoning that argues that if no measurement can be made to show a difference between two things, they are then manifestations of the same thing, two identically duplicated crystals are one and the same. Twitch one and the other says, “Ouch!”

  Progress was slow. The tunnel diode as conceived, and built by the tens of millions, is a solid-state device, meaning that it comes in one chunk. The problem was to separate the terminal semiconducting elements at their interface—the forbidden gap—and do what was necessary to keep the flow of tunneling electrons across it.

  There was a minor celebration when their meters registered the trickle of a current across a gap of a thousandth of a millimeter.

  The celebration was minor, because the thing worked as predicted. Since the theory of the tunnel diode is sound, they all knew that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle ruled over electrons crossing a physical gap, as it did over electrons crossing a mere forbidden gap at the interface between two semiconductors in physical contact.

  Then the gap was increased to a millimeter, to a centimeter, and finally the micrometer screw was removed, the two terminals remounted on separated stands, and separated by meters. It was unnerving, at first, to walk between the two, knowing that there was a statistical flow of electrons passing, hidden, from one to the other. But they were not only hidden from sight or detection, they disappeared physically from one terminal and reappeared physically at the other. The men felt nothing: nothing but uneasiness.

  Then the “other” terminal—that is, the receptor—was moved from the Channing workshop to the Franks attic, some eight kilometers distant.

  Next came nuclei. Protons and deuterons are easy to come by; the ion source has been known since long before the cyclotron. They are also easy to detect and to identify; the Aston mass spectrograph was a commercially available instrument in the middle of the twentieth century. And after protons and deuterons came helium nuclei, and then the heavier ions: singly ionized oxygen and nitrogen.

  Carbon dioxide was the first molecule to tunnel the gap. And at this point, Don Channing said, “We may be overlooking something.”

  “You mean that everything that goes over has to be ionized?”

  “No,” said Don. “That doesn’t bother me. Once we get to trying gross matter, we can simply slap an electrostatic charge on it. What bothers me is that we’re not really zapping something solid over there. So far as I know, it still may be ‘flowing’ as a stream of electrons flow. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

  “What have you in mind?” asked Franks.

  “Well, we’re about to rebuild these things, anyway. Let’s put a couple of small cabinets at either end and try an all-at-once zap of a gas volume.”

  “How small?” Walt asked quietly.

  “Couple of cubic centimeters.”

  “Shucks. Why not a full cubic meter?”

  “I’m a little concerned—”

  “Let’s compromise,” suggested Walt.

  Don eyed his lifelong friend. “From long years of close experience,” he said, “I think I’m about to be out-maneuvered. Walter, what, for example, is the size of the cabinet you’ve been building in your attic?”

  “Twenty by thirty by forty centimeters. And—”

  “It just so happens that you have it in your ‘copter?”

  “I did want to show it to you, Don. It’s an heirloom. Dad used to use it to keep the beer cold. Great fisherman, my father.”

  “And you’ve been cherishing Father’s ice chest all these decades so we could use it for our matter transporter? Wonderful! How sentimental! How truly thoughtful! And, I suppose, the scion of the Franks family, that despoiler of my daughter’s innocence, is now connecting its duplicate to the receiving terminal at your place.”

  “Why, yes. It just so happens—”

  “Walt, less circumlocution and more action. Go bring in Pappy’s ice chest.”

  Walt went out; he reappeared a moment later with a metal cabinet complete with door and latch. “Connecting it up is no problem, Don. Father, you see, had plans to convert it to an electric refrigerator, so he equipped it with connectors.”

  “And so thoughtful of him to use those high-voltage insulators for the feet. That’s what I call foresight.”

  “One more point,” said Walt. “Let’s toss this in for good old empirical information.”

  He held up a large, sixty-degree prism of some transparent material that he identified as one of the synthetic glasses with a high index of refraction.

  “Jeff has measured everything about this to fifteen or twenty decimal places,” he said. “If we zap it over there in one piece, he can measure it, and if it goes all right, we’re several steps ahead.”

  “Okay,” said Don with a shrug. “Here goes.”

  “You push the button.”

  “Nope,” said Don. “It’s your father’s ice chest. You push.”

  “Okay. One! Two! Three! Fire/” At the word, all hell broke out. The cabinet imploded with an ear-shattering, high-pitched Crack and for a moment there came the whistling screech of air rushing in through jagged cr
acks in metal.

  Over at the Franks place, the receiving cabinet exploded with an equally shattering blast that ripped the cabinet apart along the corners and seams and bulged the flat surfaces outward. A roughly rectangular hole marked the exit of the cabinet door through the wall, and every window in the room was shattered outward.

  They were surveying the ruin when Arden came rushing in. “Migawd,” she blurted. “What happened?”

  “My dear,” said Don. “At this end, Walter has just demonstrated that old Torricellian remark that ‘Nature abhors a vacuum.’ At the other end, our son-in-law has most likely been observing the truth of that statement that two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time.”

  “I have the unpleasant notion that someone is going to be pessimistic,” Walt said. “I’m about to be lectured about safety and about looking ahead, and about planning, when the important point—being grossly overlooked if not blatantly ignored—is that we did indeed transmit matter.”

  “Arden, get on the pipe and ask Jeff if we did indeed zap that prism over there.”

  “One problem I foresee,” said Walt. “Are we going to have to pull a hard vacuum on these cabinets, or conduct all transport operations from the surface of airless satellites?”

  “Neither sounds eminently acceptable,” said Don. “But I think we can make it run quietly by arranging a double switch, swapping what’s in that cabinet for what’s in this.”

  “Jeff’s on the intercom,” said Arden.

  She flipped a switch, and the loudspeaker said, I’m half deaf. Someone blew the roof off the joint.”

  “Forget the roof,” said his father. “We needed a new one, anyway. The important thing is that prism. Did it come over?”

  There were rummaging sounds on the intercom, and then Jeff returned. “If someone likes solid-problem jigsaws made of cut glass, and doesn’t mind a few hundred missing pieces, and has a lot of time and infinite patience, one might be able to restore it—partially. It sort of got fractured.”

  “Okay, Jeff,” said Don. “Call in the cleanup crew and the roofing contractor, and then let’s all have lunch. Walt, you get out the crystal ball and make contact with Madame Ouija and ask her to get the specifications for that ice chest from your father’s blithe spirit.”

  “Oh,” said Walt airily, “those were duplicates. I have a lot of them. Thought they might come in handy. Now, about that lunch?”

  -

  The economy had been ruined by the matter duplicator; when the turn of a switch, using the proper recording, can produce anything from Sunday dinner, steaming hot, to a new tire for the family wagon, not only does man get lazy, but nothing remains worth anything. No, Hilda the maid doesn’t wear faithful replicas of the crown jewels; Hilda just isn’t the maid anymore.

  And nothing is worth anything as a medium of exchange.

  Then Wes Farrell discovered the synthetic element called identium, which exploded with ruinous violence when it was touched by the scanning beam of the matter transmitter-duplicator. Identium became the medium of exchange, and the stuff upon which contracts and binding agreements were inscribed.

  Of course, once something is uncovered to the amazement of all, the next thing is to find it on every hand. On the satellites of the outer planets and upon Pluto itself, crystals and minerals born of extreme cold and lack of pressure—the opposite of the diamond—were discovered, and many of these refused dissection under the scanning beam.

  Keg Johnson’s spaceline carried humans, and as he put it, “the mail” and then these precious minerals that could not be scanned and transmitted, nor recorded and reproduced; and Life Went On in an oddball economy. But then, all economy is oddball.

  So, with the success at zapping solid matter across the forbidden gap of about eight kilometers, Channing contacted Keg Johnson over the coupled-crystal communicator.

  “Keg?” asked Channing. “Brace yourself. We’re about to bankrupt you again.”

  “I’m scared,” said Keg cheerfully. “Don, you and your crew could always solve problems, but you always waited until they hit you between the eyes before you bent a brain cell. Singly or collectively, you fellows couldn’t program a fight in an Irish bar on Boylston Street in Boston on the Eve of Saint Patrick. Now, what have you blithering geniuses cooked up, and why do you think I’m ruined?”

  “You chided me, twenty-five years ago, for not building a real matter transmitter,” Don said with some pleasure. “Keg, we’re going to transmit not only identium, but any other certified unique. Not a facsimile, nor the analog-scan signal, but the item itself. Once you get your receiver plugged in, we can pour anything into the hopper and zap it across the Solar System. The thing, the stuff, the artifact, itself.”

  “Well, I knew you’d do it sometime,” Keg said, “But have you taken the Walt Franks habit of extreme extrapolation? How do you know your devil machine will cross space?”

  “Oh, we set up a station on Neptune’s moon, Triton. Neptune, you’ll recall, has been the outermost planet since Pluto crossed its orbit in the Seventies, but Neptune is a goodly heliocentric angle ahead of Pluto—like fifty-five degrees.”

  “Damned near libration point,” Keg chuckled. “Tell me, Don, is Pluto going to be ‘Neptune Equilateral’ or is Neptune going to be ‘Pluto Equilateral’?”

  “You ground-gripping administrative types always have the quaint notion that the libration points are some sort of four-space gravitational cusp, or a detent stop,” said Don. “The celestial object that passes through one of them doesn’t go ‘Zock!’ into lock-tight position. They stay in the libration point only when they’re moving along the orbit where the libration point is. Anyway, we’ve zapped stuff over to Triton. Now we intend to zap some over to Earth. Okay?”

  “Sure—and will you wager against me that it won’t put me out of business?”

  “Nope. I’ve seen you at work, Keg. So—”

  “Whoa, fellow! There’s more important information missing.”

  “But—”

  “Why, you supreme egotist, you. Goddammit, Donald, it’s known all over that your daughter is great with child. How’re they doing?”

  “The proper phrase is ‘Great with children.’ Doctor says it’s twins.”

  “Take courage, Don. I think the maternity folks may have lost a father once about four hundred years ago—but there is no record in history of losing a grandfather. Kiss Arden for me, Don, and we’ll be a-seein’ you.”

  -

  Walt Franks entered with a wire cage containing three small field mice. “These animals are hard to find on Pluto,” he said. “I think when we zap these micers to Wes Farrell, on Triton, we’ll be cutting the mice population of Pluto by half.”

  Don chuckled. “Keg is going to get a shock when he finds out that his spaceline isn’t going to have anything to carry.”

  “Still don’t bet against Keg,” said Walt. “Communication takes two terminals, and Keg’s spaceline may be the last means by which we can plant a receiver on Ugggthubbbb.”

  “On what?”

  “The only colonizable planet in the Alpha Centauri System. Now, which of these little fellows do you like for the first?”

  “Walt, when you’ve seen one mouse, you’ve seen ‘em all. Sashay that cage to the cabinet door and let the most curious mouser venture forth. I—”

  Channing was interrupted by a screech that might have been heard on Uranus if interplanetary space hadn’t existed.

  The screecher was Arden, who ran out of breath, inhaled deeply, and then said, “Get those things out of here!”

  “This we propose to do—via tunnel transport.”

  “Well, so long as you get rid of them. And who’s going to be on the receiving end?” she asked suspiciously. “Diane?”

  “No, we’re not about to relieve me of this gran’pa kick by scaring her out of—of—of—Forget it. We’re zapping these small rodents over to Triton, where our old pal Wes Farrell is running the receiving end.”
/>   Channing poked the intercom button and said, “Wes? Stand by for the live one. Ready?”

  “Ready,” replied Farrell.

  The mouse, running aimlessly about the floor of the transmitting cabinet in the way of mice, quietly disappeared, and reappeared roaming about the receiving cabinet.

  “Live one received,” reported Wes Farrell. “I doubt that he can appreciate being the first live one to be zapped across about twenty-eight astronomical units of wide-open interplanetary space.”

  “Okay. Give me a minute-by-minute report.”

  At the end of the first minute, Farrell reported that the mouse was still acting typically mouselike. At minute two, the mouse had been proffered a bit of fairly high cheese, and had taken it in with mouselike enthusiasm. At minute three, the mouse had relieved himself—in one end and out the other. At four, no change. But at the end of five minutes—

  “Don, our mouse friend has suddenly slowed down. He’s not squealing as if in pain, it’s more like he just simply got tired. Run out of energy. Now he’s stopped cold; lain down. Flat. I’ve nudged him with a stick, but he didn’t respond. I’m little judge of mice life, Don, and wouldn’t know what to do with a mouse-sized stethoscope if I had one, but I’m very much inclined to think that we have one dead mouse on our hands.”

  “We’ll zap him back,” said Don, “and have Mephisto Medical take a look. Stand by for Number Two.”

  -

  An ordinary citizen, entering a large medical clinic with three very deceased mice and asking that they examine the trio of specimens for the cause of death, would either be curtly invited to leave or quietly invited to become a member of the smile-in ward. But when the citizen bearing the specimens happens to be a well-known scientific type, the director of any such clinic knows that something is going on over and above the development of a new way to dispose of the rodent menace.

  His report, made the following morning, was negative. “Mr. Channing,” said the director, “there is absolutely no reason for these mice to die. There are signs of anoxia, but no apparent cause.”