"Sure, as any sensible person would. Have you been up all the time?"
"Yeah. We're still up against the main trouble with telephones--the
big trouble, same as back in 1887--our friends have no telephone!
You'd be surprised how elusive a spaceship can be in the deep. Sort
of a non-existent, microscopic speck, floating in absolutely nothing.
We have a good idea of where they should be, and possibly why and
what--but we're really playing with blindfolds, handcuffs, ear plugs,
mufflers, nose clamps, and tongue-ties. I am reminded--Hey, Freddie,
about three more hundred yards--of the two blind men."
"Never mind the blind men," came back the pilot. "How'm I doing?"
"Fine. Slide out another hundred yards and hold her there."
"Who--me? Listen, Dr. Channing, you're the bird on the tape line. You
have no idea just how insignificant you look from fifty-odd thousand
miles away. Put a red-hot on the 'finders and have 'im tell me where
the ship sits."
"O.K., Freddie, you're on the beam and I'll put a guy on here to give
you the dope. Right?"
"Right!"
"Right," echoed Arden breaking in on the phone. "And I'm going to bring
you a slug of coffee and a roll. Or did you remember to eat recently?"
"We didn't," chimed in Walt.
"You get your own girl," snorted Channing. "And besides, you are needed
up here. We've got work to do."
Once again the signal lashed out. The invisible waves drove out and
began their swift rush across the void. Time, as it always did during
the waiting periods, hung like a Sword of Damocles. The half-hour
finally ticked away, and Freddie called in: "No dice. She's as silent
as the grave."
Minutes added together into an hour. The concentric wave left the
reflector and just dropped out of sight.
"Too bad you can't widen her out," suggested Don.
"I'd like to tighten it down," objected Walt. "I think we're losing
power and we can't increase the power--but we could tighten the beam."
"Too bad you can't wave it back and forth like a fireman squirting
water on a lawn," said Arden.
"Firemen don't water lawns--" began Walt Franks, but he was interrupted
by a wild yell from Channing.
"Something hurt?" asked Arden.
"No. Walt, we can wave the beam."
"Until we find 'em? We've been trying that. No worky."
Freddie called in excitedly: "Something went by just now and I don't
think it was Christmas!"
"We might have hit 'em a dozen times in the last ten minutes and we'll
never know it," said Channing. "But the spaceliners can be caught.
Let's shoot at them like popping ducks. Shotgun effect. Look, Walt, we
can electronically dance the beam at a high rate of speed, spraying
the neighborhood. Freddie can hear us return because we have to hit
them all the time and the waver coming on the way back will pass
through his position again and again. We'll set up director elements
in the reflector, distorting the electrical surface of the parabolic
reflector. That'll divert the beam. By making the phases swing right,
we can scan the vicinity of the _Empress of Kolain_ like a flying spot
television camera."
Walt turned to one of the technicians and explained. The man nodded. He
left for Franks' laboratory and Walt turned back to his friends.
"Here shoots another couple of hours. I, for one, am going to grab
forty winks."
Jim, the beam-control man, sat down and lighted a cigarette. Freddie
let his flitter coast free. And the generators that fed the powerful
transmitter came whining to a stop. But there was no sleep for Don and
Walt. They kept awake to supervise the work, and to help in hooking
up the phase-splitting circuit that would throw out-of-phase radio
frequency into the director-elements to swing the beam.
Then once again the circuits were set up. Freddie found the position
again and began to hold it. The beam hurled out again, and as the
phase-shift passed from element to element, the beam swept through an
infinitesimal arc that covered thousands of miles of space by the time
the beam reached the position occupied by the _Empress of Kolain_.
Like a painter, the beam painted in a swipe a few hundred miles wide
and swept back and forth, each sweep progressing ahead of the stripe
before by less than its width. It reached the end of its arbitrary wall
and swept back to the beginning again, covering space as before. Here
was no slow, irregular swing of mechanical reflector, this was the
electronically controlled wavering of a stable antenna.
And this time the half hour passed slowly but not uneventfully. Right
on the tick of the instant, Freddie called back: "Got 'em!"
It was a weakling beam that came back in staccato surges. A fading,
wavering, spotty signal that threatened to lie down on the job and
sleep. It came and it went, often gone for seconds and never strong
for so much as a minute. It vied, and almost lost completely, with the
constant crackle of cosmic static. It fought with the energies of the
Sun's corona and was more than once the underdog. Had this returning
beam carried intelligence of any sort it would have been wasted. About
all that could be carried on a beam as sorry as this was the knowledge
that there was a transmitter--and that it was transmitting.
But its raucous note synchronized with the paint-brush wiping of the
transmitter. There was no doubt.
* * * * *
Don Channing put an arm around Arden's waist and grinned at Walt
Franks. "Go to work, genius. I've got the _Empress of Kolain_ on
the pipe. You're the bright-eyed lad that is going to wake them up!
We've shot almost twenty hours of our allotted fifty. Make with the
megacycles, Walter. Arden and I will take in a steak, a moom pitcher,
and maybe a bit of woo. Like?" he asked the girl.
"I like," she answered.
Walt Franks smiled and stretched lazily. He made no move to the
transmitter. "Don't go away," he cautioned them. "Better call up Joe
and order beer and sandwiches for the boys in the back room. On you!"
"Make with the signals first," said Channing. "And lay off the potables
until we finish this silly job."
"You've got it. Is there a common, garden variety, transmitting key in
the place?"
"Probably. We'll have to ask. Why?"
"Ask me."
Don removed his arm from Arden's waist. He picked up a spanner and
advanced on Franks.
"No!" objected Arden. "Poison him--I can't stand the sight of blood.
Or better, bamboo splinters under the fingernails. He knows something
simple, the big bum!"
"Beer and sandwiches?" asked Walt.
"Beer and sandwiches," agreed Don. "Now, Tom Swift, what gives?"
"I want to key the beam. Y'see, Don, we're using the same frequency, by
a half dozen megacycles, as their meteor spotter. I'm going to retune
the beam to their frequency and key it. Realize what'll happen?"
"Sure," agreed Don, "but you're still missing the boat. You can't
transmit keyed intelligence with an intermittent contact."
"In words, what do you mean, Don?" asked Arden.
"International Code is a series of dots and dashes, you may know. Our
wabbling beam is whipping through the area in which the _Empress of
Kolain_ is passing. Therefore the contact is intermittent. And how
could you tell a dot from a dash?"
"Easy," bragged Walt Franks. "We're not limited to the speed of
deviation, are we?"
"Yes--limited by the speed of the selsyn motors that transfer the
phase-shifting circuits to the director radiators. Yeah, I get it,
Edison, and we can wind them up to a happy six or eight thousand r. p.
m. Six would get us a hundred cycles per second--a nice, low growl."
"And how will they receive that kind of signal on the meteor spotter?"
asked Arden.
"The officer of the day will be treated to the first meteor on record
that has intermittent duration--it is there only when it spells in
International Code!"
Prying the toy transmitting key from young James Burke was a job
only surpassed in difficulty by the task of opening the vault of the
Interplanetary Bank after working hours. But Burke, Junior, was plied
with soda pop, ice cream, and candy. He was threatened, cajoled, and
finally bribed. And what Venus Equilateral paid for the toy finally
would have made the toy manufacturer go out and look for another job.
But Walt Franks carried the key to the scene of operations and set it
on the bench to look at it critically.
"A puny gadget, at that," he said, clicking the key. "Might key a
couple of hundred watts with it--but not too long. She'd go up like a
skyrocket under our load!"
Walt opened up a cabinet and began to pull out parts. He piled several
parts on a bread board, and in an hour had a very husky thyraton hooked
into a circuit that was simplicity itself. He hooked the thyraton into
the main power circuit and tapped the key gingerly. The transmitter
followed the keyed thyraton and Don took a deep breath.
"Do you know code?" he asked.
"Used to. Forgot it when I came to Venus Equilateral. Used to hold a
ham ticket on Terra. But there's no use hamming on the station here
where you can wake somebody by yelling at the top of your voice. The
thing to ask is, 'Does anyone know code on board the _Empress of
Kolain_?'"
They forgot their keying circuit and began to adjust the transmitter
to the frequency used by the meteor spotter. It was a job. But it was
done, all the way from the master oscillator stage through the several
frequency doubler stages and to the big power-driver stage. The output
stage came next, and then a full three hours of tinkering with files
and hacksaws were required to adjust the length of the main radiator
and the director elements so that their length became right for the
changed frequency.