Mark Kingman was in a fine state of nerves. He looked upon life and the
people in it as one views the dark-brown taste of a hangover. It seemed
to him at the present time that the Lord had forsaken him, for the
entire and complete success of the solar beam had been left to Venus
Equilateral by a sheer fluke of nature.
Neither he, nor anyone else, could have foreseen the Channing
Layer, that effectively blocked any attempt to pierce it with the
strange, sub-level energy spectrum over which the driver tube and the
power-transmission tube worked, representing the so-called extremes of
the spectrum.
But Venus Equilateral, for their part, was well set. Ships plied the
spaceways, using their self-contained power only during atmospheric
passage, and paid Venus Equilateral well for the privilege. The relay
station itself was powered on the solar beam. There were other relay
stations that belonged to the Interplanetary Communications Company;
Luna, Deimos and Phobos, and the six that circled Venus in lieu of a
satellite; all were powered by the solar beam. The solar observatory on
Mercury used but little power, so the needs of the observatory became
the sole income for Terran Electric's planetary rights of the solar
beam, since Mercury owned no air of its own.
Mark Kingman was beginning to feel the brunt of Channing's statement
to the effect that legal-minded men were of little importance when it
came to the technical life in space, where men's lives and livelihood
depended more on technical skill than upon the legal pattern set for
their protection in the complex society of planetary civilization.
He swore vengeance.
So, like the man who doggedly makes the same mistake twice in a row,
Kingman was going to move Heaven, Hell, and three planets in an effort
to take a swing at the same jaw that had caught his fist between its
teeth before.
Out through the window of his office, he saw men toiling with the big
tube on the far roof; the self-same tube that had carried the terrific
load of Venus Equilateral for ten days without interruption and with no
apparent overload. Here on Terra, its output meter, operating through
a dummy load, showed not the slightest inclination to leave the bottom
peg and seek a home among the higher brackets.
So Kingman cursed and hated himself for having backed himself into
trouble. But Kingman was not a complete fool. He was a brilliant
attorney, and his record had placed him in the position of Chief
Attorney for Terran Electric, which was a place of no mean importance.
He had been licked on the other fellow's ground, with the other
fellow's tools.
He picked up papers that carried, side by side, the relative assets
of Venus Equilateral and Terran Electric. He studied them and thought
deeply.
To his scrutiny, the figures seemed about equal, though perhaps Venus
Equilateral was a bit ahead.
But--he had been licked on the other fellow's ground with the other
fellow's weapons. He thought that if he fought on his own ground with
his own tools he might be able to swing the deal.
Terran Electric was not without a modicum of experience in the tools
of the other fellow. Terran Electric's engineering department was
brilliant and efficient, too; at least the equal of Channing and Franks
and their gang of laughing gadgeteers. That not only gave him the edge
of having his own tools and his own ground, but a bit of the other
fellow's instruments, too. Certainly his engineering department should
be able to think of something good.
William Cartwright, business manager for Venus Equilateral, interrupted
Don and Walt in a discussion. He carried a page of stock market
quotations and a few hundred feet of ticker tape.
Channing put down his pencil and leaned back in his chair. Walt did
likewise, and said: "What's brewing?"
"Something I do not like."
"So?"
"The stock has been cutting didoes. We've been up and down so much it
looks like a scenic railway."
"How do we come out?"
"Even, mostly; but from my experience, I would say that some bird is
playing hooky with Venus Equilateral, Preferred. The common is even
worse."
"Look bad?"
"Not too good. It is more than possible that some guy with money and
the desire might be able to hook a large slice of V.E. Preferred. I
don't think they could get control, but they could garner a plurality
from stock outstanding on the planets. Most of the preferred stock
is in the possession of the folks out here, you know, but aside from
yourself, Walt, and a couple dozen of the executive personnel, the
stock is spread pretty thin. The common stock has a lot of itself
running around loose outside. Look!"
Cartwright began to run off the many yards of ticker tape. "Here,
some guy dumped a boatload at Canalopsis, and some other guy glommed
onto a large hunk at New York. The Northern Landing Exchange showed a
bit of irregularity during the couple of hours of tinkering, and the
irregularity was increased because some bright guy took advantage of
it and sold short." He reeled off a few yards and then said: "Next, we
have the opposite tale. Stuff was dumped at Northern Landing, and there
was a wild flurry of bulling at Canalopsis. The Terran Exchange was
just flopping up and down in a general upheaval, with the boys selling
at the top and buying at the bottom. That makes money, you know,
and if you can make the market tick your way--I mean control enough
stuff--your purchases at the bottom send the market up a few points,
and then you dump it and it drops again. It wouldn't take more than
a point or two to make a guy rich, if you had enough stock and could
continue to make the market vacillate."
"That's so," agreed Don. "Look, Bill, why don't we get some of our
Terran agents to tinkering, too? Get one of our best men to try to
outguess the market. As long as it is being done systematically, he
should be able to follow the other guy's thinking. That's the best we
can do unless we go Gestapo and start listening in on all the stuff
that goes through the station here."
"Would that help?"
"Yeah, but we'd all land in the hoosegow for breaking the secrecy
legislation. You know. 'No one shall ... intercept ... transmit ...
eavesdrop upon ... any message not intended for the listener,
and ... shall not ... be party to the use of any information
gained ... et cetera.' That's us. The trouble is this lag between the
worlds. They can prearrange their bulling and bearing ahead of time and
play smart. With a little luck, they can get the three markets working
just so--going up at Northern Landing; down at Terra; and up again at
Canalopsis, just like waves in a rope. By playing fast and loose on
paper, they can really run things hell, west and crooked. Illegal,
probably, since they each no doubt will claim to have all the stock in
their possession, and yet will be able to sell and buy the same stock
at the same time in three places."
"Sounds slightly precarious to me," objected Cartwright.
"Not at all, if you figure things just right. At a given instant, Pete
may be buying at sixty-five on Venus; Joe might be selling like furious
at seventy-one on Mars; and Jimmy may be bucking him up again by buying
at sixty-five on Terra. Then the picture and the tickers catch up with
one another, and Joe will start buying again at sixty-five, whilst Pete
and Jimmy are selling at seventy-one. Once they get their periodicity
running, they're able to tinker the market for quite a time. That's
where your man comes in, Bill. Have him study the market and step in at
the right time and grab us all a few cheap ones. Get me?"
"Sure," said Cartwright. "I get it. In that way, we'll tend to
stabilize the market, as well as getting the other guy's shares."
"Right. I'll leave it up to you. Handle this thing for the best
interests of all of us."
Cartwright smiled once again, and left with a thoughtful expression on
his face. Channing picked up the miniature of the power-transmission
tube and studied it as though the interruption had not occurred. "We'll
have to use about four of these per stage," he said. "We'll have to use
an input terminal tube to accept the stuff from the previous stage,
drop it across the low-resistance load, resistance couple the stage
to another output terminal tube where we can make use of the coupling
circuits without feedback. From there into the next tube, with the high
resistance load, and out of the power-putter-outer tube across the desk
to the next four-bottle stage."
"That's getting complicated," said Walt. "Four tubes per stage of
amplification."
"Sure. As the arts and sciences get more advanced, things tend to get
more complicated."
"That's essentially correct," agreed Walt with a smile. "But you're
foreguessing. We haven't even got a detector that will detect driver
radiation."
"I know, and perhaps this thing will not work. But after all, we've got
the tubes and we might just as well try them out just in case. We'll
detect driver radiation soon enough and then we might as well have a
few odd thoughts on how to amplify it for public use. Nothing could
tickle me more than to increase those three circles on our letterhead
to four. 'Planet to Planet, and Ship to Ship' is our hope. This
one-way business is not to my liking. How much easier it would have
been if I'd been able to squirt a call in to the station when I was
floating out there beyond Jupiter in that wrecked ship. That gave me to
think, Walt. Driver radiation detection is the answer."
"How so?"
"We'll use the detector to direct our radio beam, and the ship can have
a similar gadget coupled to their beam, detecting a pair of drivers set
at one hundred and eighty degrees from one another so the thrust won't
upset the station's celestial alignment. We can point one of them at
the ship's course, even, making it easier for them."
"Speaking of direction," said Walt thoughtfully, "have you figured why
the solar beam is always pointing behind Sol?"
"I haven't given that much thought. I've always thought that it was
due to the alignment plates not being in linear perfection so that the
power beam bends. They can make the thing turn a perfect right angle,
you know."
"Well, I've been toying with the resurrected heap you dropped into Lake
Michigan a couple of months ago, and I've got a good one for you. You
know how the beam seems to lock into place when we've got it turned to
Sol, not enough to make it certain, but more than detectably directive?"
"Yep. We could toss out the motor control that keeps her face turned to
the sun."
"That's what I was hoping to gain--" started Walt, but he stopped as
the door opened and Arden entered, followed by a man and woman.
"Hello," said Walt in a tone of admiration.
"This is Jim Baler and his sister Christine," said Arden. "Baler, the
guy with the worried look on his face is my legally wedded souse--no,
spouse. And the guy with the boudoir gorilla gleam in his vulpine eyes
is that old vulture, Walt Franks."
Walt took the introduction in his stride and offered Christine his
chair. Arden stuck her tongue out at him, but Walt shrugged it off.
Channing shook hands with Jim Baler and then sought the "S" drawer of
his file cabinet. He found the Scotch and the soda, and then grinned:
"Should have the ice under 'I' but it's sort of perishable, and so we
keep it in the refrigerator. Arden, breach the 'G' drawer, please, and
haul out the glasses. I suppose we could refrigerate the whole cabinet,
but it wouldn't sound right if people heard that we kept their mail on
ice. Well--"
"Here's how, if we don't already know," said Walt, clinking glasses
with Christine.
"Walt earned that 'wolf' title honestly," laughed Arden, "he likes to
think. Frankly, he's a sheep in wolf's clothing!"
"What are his other attributes?" asked Christine.
"He invents. He scribbles a bit. He cuts doodles on tablecloths, and he
manages to get in the way all the time," said Don. "We keep him around
the place for his entertainment value."
"Why--"
"Quiet, Walter, or I shall explain the sordid details of the Walter
Franks Electron Gun."
"What was that one?" asked Christine.
"You really wouldn't want to know," Walt told her.
"Oh, but I would."
"Yeah," growled Franks, "you would!"
"Would you rather hear it from him or me?" Arden asked.
"He'll tell me," said Christine. Her voice was positive and assured.
"And that'll take care of that," said Arden. "But I think we
interrupted something. What were you saying about gaining, Walt?"
"Oh, I was saying that I was tinkering around with the _Anopheles_. We
hooked it up with the solar beam for power, and I got to wondering
about that discrepancy. The faster you go, the greater is the angular
displacement, and then with some measurements, I came up with a bugger
factor--"
"Whoa, goodness," laughed Christine. "What is a bugger factor?"
"You'll learn," said Arden, "that the boys out here have a language all
their own. I've heard them use that one before. The bugger factor is a
sort of multiplying, or dividing, or additive, or subtractive quantity.
You perform the mathematical operation with the bugger factor, and your
original wrong answer turns into the right answer."
"Is it accepted?"
"Oh, sure," answered Arden. "People don't realize it, but that string
of 4's in the derivation of Bode's law is a bugger factor."
"You," said Christine to Walt, "will also tell me what Bode's law
is--but later."
"O.K.," grinned Walt. "At any rate, I came up with a bugger factor
that gave me to think. The darned solar beam points to where Sol
actually is!"
"_Whoosh!_" exclaimed Channing. "You don't suppose we're tinkering with
the medium that propagates the law of gravity?"
"I don't know. I wouldn't know. Has anyone ever tried to measure the
velocity of propagation of the attraction of gravity?"
"No, and no one will until we find some way of modulating it."
Jim Baler smiled. "No wonder Barney was a little wacky when he got
home. I come out here to take a look around and maybe give a lift to
your gang on the transmission tube--and bump right into a discussion on
the possibility of modulating the law of gravity!"
"Not the law, Jim, just the force."
"Now he gets technical about it. You started out a couple of months
ago to detect driver radiation, and ended up by inventing a beam
that draws power out of the sun. Think you'll ever find the driver
radiation?"
"Probably."
"Yeah," drawled Arden. "And I'll bet a hat that when they do, they
won't have any use for it. I've seen 'em work before."
"Incidentally," said Christine, "you mentioned the _Anopheles_, and I
think that is the first ship I've ever heard of that hasn't a feminine
name. How come?"
"The mosquito that does the damage is the female," grinned Jim. "The
Mojave spaceyards owns a sort of tender craft. It has a couple of big
cranes on the top and a whole assortment of girders near the bottom.
It looks like, and is also called _The Praying Mantis_. Those are also
female: at least the ones that aren't afraid of their own shadow are."
Channing said suddenly: "Walt, have you tried the propagation-time of
the solar beam on the _Anopheles_?"
"No. How would we go about doing that?"
"By leaving the controls set for one G, and then starting the ship by
swapping the tube energizing voltages from test power to operating
power."
"Should that tell us?"
"Sure. As we know, the amount of energy radiated from the sun upon a
spot the size of our solar tube is a matter of peanuts compared to the
stuff we must get out of it. Ergo, our beam must go to Sol and collect
the power and draw it back down the beam. Measure the transit-time, and
we'll know."
"That's an idea. I've got a micro-clock in the lab. We can measure it
to a hundred-millionth of a second. Anyone like to get shook up?"
"How?" asked Jim.
"Snapping from zero to one G all to oncet-like isn't too gentle. She'll
knock your eyes out."
"Sounds like fun. I'm elected."
"So am I," insisted Christine.
"No," said Jim. "I know what he's talking about."
"So do I," said Arden. "Don't do it."
"Well, what better have you to offer?" asked Christine unhappily.
"You and I are going down to the Mall."
Channing groaned in mock anguish. "Here goes another closet full of
female haberdashery. I'm going to close that corridor some day, or put
a ceiling on the quantity of sales, or make it illegal to sell a woman
anything unless she can prove that 'she has nothing to wear!'"
"That, I'd like to see," said Walt.
"You would," snorted Arden. "Come on, Chris. Better than the best of
three worlds is available."
"That sort of leaves me all alone," said Don. "I'm going to look up Wes
Farrell and see if he's been able to make anything worth looking at for
a driver detector."
Don found Wes in the laboratory, poring over a complicated circuit.
Farrell was muttering under his breath, and probing deep into the maze
of haywire on the bench.
"Wes, when you get to talking to yourself, it's time to take a jaunt to
Joe's."
"Not right now," objected Wes. "I haven't got that hollow leg that your
gang seem to have developed. Besides, I'm on the trail of something."
"Yes?" Channing forgot about Joe's, and was all interest.
"I got a wiggle out of the meter there a few minutes ago. I'm trying to
get another one."
"What was it like?"
"Wavered up and down like fierce for about a minute after I turned it
on. Then it died quick, and has been dead ever since."
"Could it have been anything cockeyed with the instruments?"
"Nope. I've checked every part in this circuit, and everything is as
good as it ever will be. No, something external caused that response."
"You've tried the solar tube with a dynode of the same alloy as the
driver cathodes?"
"Uh-huh. Nothing at all. Oh, I'll take that back. I got a scratch.
With a pre-meter gain of about four hundred decibels, I read three
micro-microamperes. That was detected from a driver tube forty feet
across the room, running at full blast. I wondered for a minute whether
the opposing driver was doing any cancellation, and so I took a chance
and killed it for about a half second, but that wasn't it."
"Nuts. Does the stuff attenuate with distance?"
"As best as I could measure, it was something to the tune of inversely
proportional to the cube of the distance. That's not normal for
beams since it shows that the stuff isn't globularly radiated.
But the amplifier gain was hanging right on the limit of possible
amplification, and the meter was as sensitive as a meter can be made, I
think. You couldn't talk from one end of Venus Equilateral to the other
with a set like that."
"No, I guess you're right. Hey! Look!"
The meter took a sudden upswing, danced for a minute, and died once
more.
"What have you got in there? What did you change?"
"Oh, I got foolish and tried a tuned circuit across the output of one
of the miniature transmission tubes. It's far enough away from the big
beams and stuff at the north end so that none of the leakage can cause
trouble. Besides, I'm not getting anything like our beam transmissions."
Channing laughed. "Uh-huh, looks to me like you're not getting much of
anything at all."
Farrell smiled wryly. "Yeah, that's so," he agreed. "But look, Don,
Hertz himself didn't collect a transcontinental short-wave broadcast on
his first attempt."
"If Hertz had been forced to rely upon vacuum tubes, his theories
couldn't have been formulated, I think," said Channing. "At least, not
by him. The easier frequencies and wave lengths are too long; a five
hundred meter dipole can't be set up in a small room for laboratory
tinkering. The kind of frequencies that come of dipoles a couple of
feet long, such as Hertz used, are pretty hard to work with unless you
have special tubes."
"Hertz had rotten detectors, too. But he made his experiments with
spark-gap generators, which gave sufficient high-peak transients to
induce spark-magnitude voltages in his receiving dipole."
"I'm not too sure of that tuned-circuit idea of yours, Wes. Go ahead
and tinker to your heart's content, but remember that I'm skeptical of
the standard resonance idea."
"Why?"
"Because we've been tinkering with driver tubes for years and
years--and we have also been gadgeting up detectors, radio hootnannies,
and stuff of the electronic spectrum all the way from direct current
to hard X-rays, and we have yet to have anything react to driver
radiation. Ergo, I'm skeptical."
The call bell rang for Channing, and he answered. It was Walt Franks.
"Don," he said with a laugh in his voice, though it was apparent that
he felt slightly guilty about laughing, "got a 'gram from Addison, the
project engineer on the solar beam from Terran Electric. Says: 'Finally
got through Channing Layer. Power by the megawatt hour in great shape.
But the atmosphere from the Channing Layer right down to the snout of
the tube is a dull red scintillation. Like the driver tube trail--it
ionizes the atmosphere into ozone. Power by the megawatt, and ozone by
the megaton.'"
"Ozone, hey? Lots of it?"
"Plenty, according to the rest of this. It looks to me like a sort of
'denatured' power system. There it is, all nice and potent, cheap,
and unlicensed. But the second swallow going down meets the first one
on the way back. Power they got--but the ozone they can't take; it's
poisonous like a nice dose of chlorine. Poor Terran Electric!"
* * * * *
Mark Kingman sat in the control room of a ship of space and worried.
Below the dome, Venus covered three-quarters of the sky, and it circled
slowly as the Terran Electric ship oscillated gently up and down.
Before Kingman, on the desk, were pages of stock market reports. On a
blackboard, a jagged line denoted the vacillation of Venus Equilateral
Preferred. This phase of his plan was working to perfection. Gradually,
he was buying share after share out of uninterested hands by his
depredations. Soon he would have enough stock to stage a grand show,
and then he could swing the thing his way.
His worry was not with this affair.
He gloated over that. His belief that he could beat this Venus
Equilateral crowd if he fought them on _his_ ground with _his_ weapon
was being corroborated. That, plus the fact that he was using some of
Venus Equilateral's own thunder to do the job, was giving him to think
that it was but a matter of time.
And the poor fools were not aware of their peril. Oh, some bird was
trying to buck him, but he was not prepared as Kingman was, nor had he
the source of information that Kingman had.