"Wonderful stuff, love," smiled Franks.
"It is," agreed Jeanne. A dreamy look came into her eyes.
"Scram, Jeanne. There are times when you can't work worth a darn.
Mostly when you're thinking of that husband of yours. What's he got
that I haven't?"
"Me," said Jeanne slyly. She arose and started for the door. "Oh," she
said, "I almost forgot. Warren phoned and said that the turret is ready
for a try-out."
"Fine," said Walt. "Swell." He unfolded himself from the chair with
alacrity and almost beat the girl to the door.
"My," she laughed, "you can move after all."
"Sure," he grinned. "Now that I have something for which to live."
"I hope it's worth it. You've sunk a lot of change into that bug-house."
"I know, but we can stand it. After all, since Don took over this
affair, Venus Equilateral is an up and running business. We're out of
the Government subsidy class now, and are making money. If this works,
we'll make more. It's worth a gamble."
"What are you trying to build?" asked Jeanne.
"Why, since this business of contacting ships-at-space has become so
universally liked, we have a tough time keeping ships on the mobile
beam. That's because they are always ducking out of the way of loose
meteorites and stuff, and that screws up their course. We can't see
'em, and must take their position on the basis of their expected
course. We never know whether we hit 'em until they land.
"Now I've been trying to devise a space gun that will blast meteors
directly instead of avoiding them by coupling the meteor detector to
the autopilot."
"Gonna shoot 'em out of existence?"
"Not exactly. Popping at them with any kind of a rifle would be like
trying to hit a flying bird with a spitball. Look, Jeanne, speed on the
run from Mars to Terra at major opposition is up among the thousands of
miles per second at the turnover. A meteor itself may be blatting along
at fifty miles per second. Now a rifle, shooting a projectile at a few
thousand feet per second, would be useless. You'd have the meteor in
your lap and out of the other side while the projectile is making up
its mind to move forward and relieve the pressure that is building up
behind it due to the exploding powder.
"I've designed an electron gun. It is a superpowered, over-sized
edition of the kind they used to use in kinescope tubes, oscilloscope
tubes, and electron microscopes. Since the dingbat is to be used in
space, we can leave the works of the gun open and project a healthy
stream of electrons at the offending object without their being slowed
and dispersed by an impeding atmosphere."
"But that sounds like shooting battleships with a toy gun."
"Not so fast on the objections, gal," said Franks. "I've seen a simple
oscilloscope tube with a hole in the business end. It was burned right
through a quarter inch of glass because the fellows were taking pix and
had the intensity turned up high. The sweep circuit blew a fuse and the
beam stopped on one spot. That was enough to puncture the screen."
"I see. That was just a small affair."
"A nine-inch tube. The electron gun in a nine-inch kinescope tube is
only about four inches long and three-quarters of an inch in diameter.
Mine, out there in the turret, is six feet in diameter and thirty feet
long. I can fire out quite a bundle of electrons from a tube of that
size."
"It sounds as though you mean business."
"I do. This is the right place to do research of that kind. Out here on
Venus Equilateral, we're in a natural medium for an electron gun, and
we've the power requirements to run it. I can't think of any place in
the system that offers better chances."
"When are you going to try it out?"
"As soon as a meteor comes over the pike, as long as Warren says we're
ready."
Jeanne shook her head. "I wish Channing were here. Things are wild
enough when you are both working on something screwball, but I could
get scared something fierce at the thought of either one of you working
without the other."
"Why?"
"You two sort of act as balance wheels to one another's craziness. Oh,
don't take that word to heart. Everybody on the relay station thinks
the world of you two, myself included. _Craziness_ in this case means a
sort of friendly description of the way your brains work. Both of you
dash off on tangents now and then, and when either one of you get off
the beam, the other one seems to swing the weight required to bring the
lost one back to the fold."
"That's a real mess of mixed metaphors, Jeanne. But I am going to
surprise Don hairless when he gets back here and finds that I've done
what people claimed couldn't be done. I'm going to be the bird whose
bust sits in the Hall of Fame in between Edison, Einstein, Alexander
Graham Bell, S. F. B. Morse, and--"
"Old Man River, Jack Frost, and Little Boy Blue," laughed Jeanne. "I
hope it's not a bust, Walt."
"You mean I should have a whole statue?"
"I mean, I hope your dream is not a bust."
Jeanne left, with Walt right behind her. Franks did not remain at the
desk, however, but made his way from the office level to the outer
skin of the relay station by way of a not-often-used stairway that
permitted him to drop to the outer skin. Above his head were the first
levels of apartmental cubicles occupied by the personnel of Venus
Equilateral. Out here, Walt had but a scant thickness of steel between
him and the void of space.
Franks came to a room built from outer skin to inner skin and about
fifty feet in diameter. He unlocked the door with a key on his watch
chain, and entered. Warren was waiting for him.
"Hi, ordnance expert. We're ready as soon as they are."
"How's she working?"
"I should know? We've been squirting ropes of electrons out to blank
space for hours. She gets rid of them all right. But have we done any
good? I dunno."
"Not a meteor in sight, I suppose."
"The detector hasn't blinked once. But when she does, your electron gun
will pick it up a thousand miles before it gets here, and will follow
the darned thing until it gets a half thousand miles out of sight."
"That sounds fine. It's a good thing that we don't have to swivel that
mess of tube around a whole arc in actual use. It would take too long.
But we'll put one in each quadrant of a spaceship and devise it so that
its working arc will be small enough to make it work. Time enough to
find that out after we know if it works."
"That's something that I've been wondering about," said Warren. "Why
didn't we build a small one out here and evacuate the skin for a few
hundred feet? We could set up a few chunks of iron and squirt electrons
at them."
"And have the folks upstairs screaming? Nope. I've a hunch that when
this beam hits something hard, it will create quite a ruckus. It would
be fine to have a hunk blown right off the skin, wouldn't it?"
"Guess you're right," admitted Warren.
The meteor alarm flashed, and a bell dinged once.
"Here's our chance," snapped Walt. "We've about fifteen seconds to work
on this one."
He looked out of a tiny window, and saw that the big tube had lined up
with the tiny model that was a monitor for the big tube. He sighted
through the model, which in itself was a high-powered telescope, and he
saw the jagged meteor rushing forward at an angle to the station. It
would miss by many miles, but it would offer a good target.
"Cathode's hot," said Warren.
Walt Franks grasped the power switch and thrust it down part way.
Meters leaped up their scales and from somewhere there came the
protesting whine of tortured generators. Through the window, nothing
very spectacular was happening. The cathode glowed slightly brighter
due to the passage of current through its metal and out of the coated
surface. But the electrostatic stresses that filled the gaps between
the accelerator and focussing anodes was no more visible than the
electricity that runs a toy motor. Its appearance had not changed a
bit, but from the meters, Walt Franks knew that megawatts of electronic
power, in the shape of high-velocity electrons, were being poured from
the cathode, accelerated by the ring anodes; and focussed to a narrow
beam by the focussing anodes. And from the end of the framework that
supported these anodes, a stream of high-velocity electrons poured
forth, twelve inches in diameter.
Through the telescope, the meteor did not seem to be disturbed. It
exploded not, neither did it melt. It came on inexorably, and if the
inanimate nickel and iron of a meteor can be said to have such, it came
on saucily and in utter disregard for the consequences.
Frantically, Walt cranked the power up higher and higher, and the
lights all over the station dimmed as the cathode gun drained the
resources of the station.
Still no effect.
Then in desperation, Walt slammed the power lever down to the bottom
notch. The girders strained in the tube from the terrific electrostatic
stresses, and for a second, Walt was not certain that the meteor was
not finally feeling the effects of the electron bombardment.
He was not to be sure, for the experiment came to a sudden stop.
An insulator arced where it led the high-voltage lines that fed the
anodes through the wall. Immediately it flashed over, and the room
filled to the brim with the pungent odor of burning insulation. A
medium-voltage anode shorted to one of the high-voltage anodes, and the
stress increased in the tube. They broke from their moorings, these
anodes, and plunged backward, down the tube toward the cathode. They
hit, and it was enough to jar the whole tube backward on the gimbals.
The shock warped the mounting of the tube, and it flexed slightly, but
sufficiently to bring the farthermost and highest voltage anode into
the electron stream. It glowed redly, and the secondary emission raved
back through the series of electrodes, heating them and creating more
warpage.
Then the pyrotechnics stopped. Great circuit breakers crashed open up
in the power room hundreds of feet above them, high in the station.
Walt Franks looked out through the window at the tangled mess that
had been a finely machined piece of equipment. He saw the men looking
quizzically at him as he turned away from the window, and with a smile
that cost him an effort, he said: "All right, so Marconi didn't get WLW
on his first try, either. Come on, fellows, and we'll clean up this
mess."
With the utter disregard that inanimate objects show toward the inner
feelings of the human being, the meteor alarm blinked again and the
bell rang. The pilot tube swiveled quickly to one side, lining up with
the spot in the celestial globe of the meteor detector. In the turret
that housed the big tube, motors strived against welded commutators
and the big tube tried to follow.