* * * * *
Don Channing smiled at Arden. "Mrs. Channing," he said, "must you
persist in keeping me from my first love?"
Arden smiled winningly. "Naturally. That's what I'm here for. I intend
to replace your first love entirely and completely."
"Yeah," drawled Don, "and what would we live on?"
"I'll permit you to attend to your so-called first love during eight
hours every day, provided that you remember to think of me every
half-hour."
"That's fine. But you really aren't fair about it. We were on Terra
for two weeks. I was just getting interested in a program outlined by
one of the boys that works for Interplanet, and what happened? You
hauled me off to Mars. We stayed for a week at the Terraland Hotel at
Canalopsis and the first time that Keg Johnson came to see us with an
idea and a sheaf of papers, you rushed me off to Lincoln Head. Now I'm
scared to death that some guy will try to open a blueprint here; at
which I'll be rushed off to Palanortis Country until someone finds us
there. Then it'll be the Solar Observatory on Mercury or the Big Glass
on Luna."
Arden soothed Don's ruffled feelings by sitting on his lap and
snuggling. "Dear," she said in a voice that positively dripped, "we're
on a honeymoon, remember?"
Don stood up, dumping Arden to the floor. "Yeah," he said, "but this is
the highest velocity honeymoon that I ever took!"
"And it's the first one I was ever on where the bridegroom took more
time admiring beam installations than he took to whisper sweet
nothings to his gal. What has a beam transmitter got that I haven't
got?"
"One: Its actions can be predicted. Two: It can be controlled. Three:
It never says anything original, but only repeats what it has been
told. Four: It can be turned off."
"Yeah?" drawled Arden, grinning wisely. "And how about this rumor?"
"Rumor?" asked Channing innocently.
"Yes--rumor!" stormed Arden with a chuckle. "Keep you from your first
love, me eye. I'll play second fiddle to nothing, Donald. I'll just
replace your original first love, but I'm too stinking bright to make
you forget it entirely. That, my sweet, is why I brought you here. You
can go chase the rumor whilst I do a bit of shopping. May I borrow your
checkbook?"
"Rumor?" repeated Channing with some puzzlement. "What rumor?"
"Rumor has it," said Arden in hyperbolic tones, "that two gentlemen,
by name James Baler and Bernard Carroll, who have spent years digging
up and studying the ancient Martian Artifacts, have recently uncovered
a large and strange type of vacuum tube that seems to have been used
by the Martians as a means of transmitting power. Since I felt that
the time had come for the honeymooners to spend at least eight minutes
apart, I insisted upon Lincoln Head for our next stop because Lincoln
Head happens to have been the scene of some rare happenings, if rumor--"
"Oh, nuts," grinned Channing. "That's no rumor--"
"And you let me ramble on," cried Arden.
She caught Don on the point of the chin with a pillow and effectively
smothered him. She followed her advantage with a frontal attack that
carried him backward across the bed, where she landed on top viciously
and proceeded to lambaste him with the other pillow.
It was proceeding according to plan, this private, good-natured war,
until a knock on the door brought a break in operations. Channing
struggled out from beneath Arden and went to the door, trying to comb
his hair by running spread fingers through it. He went with a sense
of failure caused by Arden's quiet laugh and the statement that he
resembled a bantam rooster.
The man at the door apologized, and then said: "I'm Doug Ferris of the
_Triworld News_."
"Come in," said Don, "and see if you can find a place to sit."
"Thanks."
"I didn't know that _Triworld News_ was interested in the wedded life
of the Channings. Why doesn't _Triworld_ wait until we find out about
it ourselves?"
"_Triworld_ does not care to pry into the private life of the newly wed
Channing family," laughed Doug. "We, and the rest of the system, do not
give a damn whether Mrs. Channing calls you Bunny-bit or Sugar-pie--"
"Sweetums," corrected Arden with a gleam in her eye.
"--we've got something big to handle. I can't get a thing out of the
gang at Canalopsis, they're all too busy worrying."
"And so you came here? What do you expect to get out of us? We're not
connected in any way with Canalopsis."
"I know," said Doug, "but you do know space. Look, Channing, the _Solar
Queen_ has been missing since yesterday morning!"
Don whistled.
"See what I mean? What I want to know is this: What is your opinion on
the matter? You've lived in space for years, on Venus Equilateral and
you've had experience beyond anybody I can reach."
"Missing since yesterday morning," mused Channing. "That means trouble."
"That's what I thought. Now if you were running the spaceport at
Canalopsis, what would your own private opinion be?"
"I don't know whether I should speak for publication," said Don.
"It won't be official. I'll corroborate anything you say before it
is printed, and so on. But I want an unofficial opinion, too. If you
want this withheld, say so, but I still want a technical deduction to
base my investigation on. I don't understand the ramifications and the
implications of a missing ship. It is enough to make Keg Johnson's hair
turn gray overnight, though, and I'd like to know what is so bad before
I start to turn stones."
"Well, keep it off the record until Canalopsis gives you the go-ahead.
I can give you an opinion, but I don't want to sound official."
"O.K. Do you suppose she was hit by a meteor shower?"
"Doubt it like the devil. Meteor detectors are many and interconnected
on a spaceship, as well as being alarmed and fused to the nth degree.
Any trouble with them will bring a horde of ringing bells all through
the ship which would bring the personnel a-running. They just don't go
wrong for no reason at all."
"Suppose that so many meteors came from all directions that the factors
presented to the autopilot--"
"No dice. The possibility of a concentration of meteors from all
directions all about to pass through a certain spot in space is
like betting on two Sundays in a row. Meteors don't just run in all
directions, they have a general drift. And the meteor detecting
equipment would have been able to pick up the centroid of any group of
meteors soon enough to lift the ship around it. Why, there hasn't been
a ship hit by a meteor in ten years."
"But--"
"And if it had been," continued Channing, "the chances are more than
likely that the ship wouldn't have been hit badly enough to make it
impossible to steer, or for the crew to shoot out message tubes which
would have landed on Canalopsis."
"Look, there's one thing I don't understand," said Doug. "Spacecraft
are always dodging meteors, yet Venus Equilateral seems immune."
"It's the velocity," explained Don. "Venus Equilateral is traveling
at the same speed as Venus, of course. A spacecraft hits it up in
the hundreds of miles per second. Say two hundred and seventy miles
per second, which is about ten times the orbital velocity of Venus
Equilateral. Then with a given dispersion of meteors throughout space,
any spacecraft has ten times the possible chances of encounter because
the ship covers ten times the volume in the same time. Besides, truly
missing meteors is a hypothetical problem."
"How so?"
"To avoid only those whose courses will intersect yours would demand
some sort of course predicting gear that would read the course of the
oncoming meteor and apply it in a space problem to the predicted course
of the ship. That's just too much machinery, Doug. So spacecraft merely
turn aside for anything that even _looks_ close. They don't take any
chances at all," said Don Channing. "They can't afford to."
"Suppose that the ship ducked a big shower and it went so far out of
course that they missed Mars?"
"That's out, too," laughed Channing.
"Why?"
"A standard ship of space is capable of hitting it up at about four
G all the way from Terra to Mars at major opposition and end up with
enough power and spare cathodes to continue to Venus in quadrature. Now
the velocity of the planets in their orbits is a stinking matter of
miles per second, while the top speed of a ship in even the shortest
passage runs up into four figures per second. You'd be surprised at
what velocity you can attain at one G for ten hours."
"Yes?"
"It runs to slightly less than two hundred and fifty miles per second,
during which you've covered only four million miles. In the shortest
average run from Venus to Terra at conjunction, a skimpy twenty-five
million miles, your time of travel is a matter of twenty-five hours
odd, running at the standard two G. Your velocity at turnover--or the
halfway point where the ship stops going _up_ from Terra and starts to
go _down_ to Venus--is a cool five hundred miles per second. So under
no condition would the ship miss its objective badly enough to cause
its complete loss. Why, this business is run so quickly that were it
not for the saving in time and money that amounts to a small percentage
at the end of each flight, the pilot could head for his planet and
approach the planet asymptotically."
"You know what you're doing, don't you?" asked the reporter.
"I think so."
"You're forcing my mind into accepting something that has never
happened before, and something that has no basis for its--"
"You mean piracy? I wonder. We've all read tales of the Jolly Roger
being painted on the side of a sleek ship of space while the pirate,
who is a fine fellow at heart though uninhibited, hails down the
cruiser carrying radium. He swipes the stuff and kisses all the women
whilst menacing the men with a gun-hand full of searing, coruscating,
violently lethal ray pistol. But that sounds fine in stories. The trick
is tougher than it sounds, Douglas. You've got to catch your rabbit
first."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that finding a ship in space to prey upon is somewhat less
difficult than juggling ten billiard balls whilst riding a horse
blindfolded. Suppose you were to turn pirate. This is what would happen:
"You'd get the course of the treasure ship from the spaceport, fine and
good, by resorting to spies and such. You'd lie in wait out there in
the blackness of space, fixing your position by the stars and hoping
that your error in fix was less than a couple of hundred thousand
miles. The time comes. You look to your musket, sharpen your cutlass,
and see to the priming of your derringers that are thrust into the red
sash at your waist. You are right on the course, due to your brilliant
though lawless navigator who was tossed out of astrogator's school for
filching the teacher's whiskey. Then the treasure ship zoops past at
a healthy hundred miles per second and you decide that since she is
hitting it up at two G, you'd have had to start from scratch at a heck
of a lot better to catch her within the next couple of light years."
"But suppose you took the course as laid and applied the same
acceleration? Suppose you followed on the heels of your quarry until
you were both in space? You could do it then, couldn't you?"
"Gosh," said Channing, "I never thought of that. That's the only way a
guy could pirate a ship--unless he planted his men on board and they
mutinied."
"Then it might be pirates?"
"It might be," admitted Channing. "It'd have to occur near beginning
or end, of course, though. I can't think of anything safer than being
shot at out of a gun of any kind while both crates are hitting it up at
a couple of hundred miles per second and at a distance of a few miles
apart. It would be all right if you were both running free, but at two
G acceleration, you'd have to do quite a bit of ballistic gymnastics to
score a hit."
"Or run in front of your quarry and sow a bouquet of mines."
"Except that the meteor detector would show the position of the pirate
craft in the celestial globe and the interconnecting circuits would
cause the treasure ship to veer off at a sharp angle. Shucks, Doug,
this thing has got too many angles to it. I can't begin to run it off
either way. No matter how difficult it may sound, there are still ways
and means to do it. The one thing that stands out like a sore thumb
is the fact that the _Solar Queen_ has turned up missing. Since no
inanimate agency could cause failure, piracy is the answer."
"You're sure of that?"
"Not positive. There are things that might cause the ship to founder.
But what they are depends on too many coincidences. It's like hitting a
royal flush on the deal, or filling a full house from two pairs."
"Well, thanks, Channing. I'm heading back to Canalopsis right now. Want
to come along?"
Channing looked at Arden, who was coming from the dressing room
carrying her coat and he nodded. "The gal says yes," he grinned. "Annoy
her until I find my shoes, will you?"
Arden wrinkled her nose at Don. "I'll like that," she said to Doug.
* * * * *
The trip from Lincoln Head to Canalopsis was a fast one. Doug drove
the little flier through the thin air of Mars at a breakneck speed
and covered the twelve hundred miles in just shy of an hour. At the
spaceport, Channing found that he was not denied the entrance as the
reporter had been. He was ushered into the office of Keg Johnson, and
he and the manager of the Canalopsis Spaceport greeted Don with a
worried expression on his face.
"Still gone," said Johnson cryptically. "Like the job of locating her?"
Don shook his head with a sympathetic smile. "Like trying to find a
grain of sand on a beach--a specified grain, I mean. Wouldn't know how
to go about it."
Keg nodded. "I thought as much. That leaves her out of the picture.
Well, up to now space travel has been about as safe as spending the
evening in your easy-chair. Hello, Arden, how's married life?"
"Can't tell yet," she said with a twinkle. "I've got to find out
whether I can break him of a dozen bad habits before I'll commit
myself."
"I wish you luck, Arden, although from that statement, it's Don that
needs the luck."
"We came to see if there was anything we could do about the _Solar
Queen_," offered Channing.
"What can anybody do?" asked Keg with spread hands. "About all we can
do is to put it down in our remembrances and turn to tomorrow. Life
goes on, you know," said Keg in a resigned tone, "and either we keep up
or we begin to live in the past. Are you going to stay here for a day
or two?"
"Was thinking about it," said Don.
"Well, suppose you register at the Terraland and meet me back here for
lunch. If anything occurs, I'll shoot you a quickie." Keg looked at his
watch and whistled. "Lordy," he said ruefully. "I didn't know how late
it was. Look, kids, I'll run you downtown myself, and we'll all have
lunch at the Terraland. How's that?"
"Sounds better," admitted Channing. "My appetite, you know."
"I know," laughed Arden. "Come on, meat-eater, and we'll peel a calf."
It was during lunch that a messenger raced into the dining room and
handed Keg a letter. Keg read, and then swore roundly. He tossed the
letter across the table to Don and Arden.