Faintly striving against that fearful racket there came a piping,
flat-sounding human voice that said: "Kingman! V.E. Preferred just hit
eighty-nine!"
Kingman scowled and punched on the intership teletype machine. Using
the communicator set with that racket would have been impossible.
The radio man read the note that appeared on his 'type, and smiled
grimly. He saw to his helio-mirror and sighted through a fine telescope
at a spot on Venus, three thousand miles below. The helio began to send
its flashing signal to this isolated spot near the Boiling River, and
it was read, acknowledged, and repeated for safety's sake. The radio
man flashed "O.K." and went back to his forty-seventh game of chess
with the assistant pilot.
The helio man on the Boiling River read the message, grinned, and
stepped to the telephone. He called a number at Northern Landing, and a
tight beam sped across the northern quarter of Venus to a man connected
with the Venus Stock Market. The man nodded, and said to another: "Buy
fifteen hundred--use the name of Ralph Gantry this time."
The stock purchased under the name of Ralph Gantry was signed, sealed
and delivered exactly fifteen minutes before the ticker projection on
the grand wall of the Exchange showed the V.E. Preferred stock turn
the bottom curve and start upward by hitting eighty-nine!
Back in the Terran Electric spaceship Kingman's ears were still beset
by the roaring, alien music.
He was sitting in his chair with his head between his hands, and
did not see the man approaching the instrument panel with a pair
of side-cutters in one hand. The man reached the panel, lifted
it slightly, and reached forward. Then Kingman, hearing a slight
imperfection in the wail of the speaker, looked up, jumped from his
chair, and tackled the engineer.
"You blasted fool!" blazed Kingman. "You idiot!"
The music stopped at his third word, and the scream of his voice in the
silence of the room almost scared Kingman himself.
"Mark, I'm going nuts. I can't stand that racket."
"You're going to stand it. Unless you can get something to cut it out."
"I can't. I'm not brilliant enough to devise a circuit that will cut
that noise and still permit the entry of your fellow on Luna."
"Then you'll live with it."
"Mark, why can't we take that relay apart and work on it?"
"Ben, as far as I know, that relay is what Channing and his gang would
give their whole station for--and will, soon enough. I don't care how
it works--or why!"
"That's no way to make progress," objected Ben.
"Yeah, but we've got the only detector for driver radiation in this
part of the universe! I'm not going to have it wrecked by a screwball
engineer who doesn't give a care what's going on as long as he can
tinker with something new and different. What do we know about it?
Nothing. Therefore how can you learn anything about it? What would you
look for? What would you expect to find?"
"But where is that music coming from?"
"I don't know. As best as we can calculate, driver radiation propagates
at the square of the speed of light, and that gives us a twenty-four
minute edge on Venus Equilateral at the present time. For all I know,
that music may be coming from the other end of the galaxy. At the
square of the speed of light, you could talk to Centauri and get an
answer in not too long."
"But if we had a chance to tinker with that relay, we might be able to
find out what tunes it and then we can tune in the Lunar station and
tune out that cat-melody."
"I'm running this show--and this relay is going to stay right where
it is. I don't care a hoot about the control circuit it breaks; these
controls are set, somehow, so that we can detect driver radiations and
I'm not taking any chances of having it ruined."
"Can't you turn the gain down, at least?"
"Nope. We'd miss the gang at Luna."
The speaker spoke in that faint, flat-toned human voice again. It was
easy to see that all that gain was necessary to back up the obviously
faint response of Kingman's detector. The speaker said: "Kingman!
Addison got power through the Channing Layer!"
That was all for about an hour. Meanwhile, the mewling tones burst
forth again and again, assaulting the ears with intent to do damage.
The messages were terse and for the most part uninteresting. They gave
the market reports: they intercepted the beam transmissions through the
Terran Heaviside Layer before they got through the Lunar Relay Station,
inspected the swiftly-moving tape and transmitted the juicy morsels to
Kingman via the big driver tube that stood poised outside of the landed
spaceship.
Kingman enjoyed an hour of celebration at Addison's success, and then
the joy turned to bitter hate as the message came through telling of
the ozone that resulted in the passage of the solar beam through the
atmosphere. The success of the beam, and the utter impossibility of
using it were far worse than the original fact of the beam's failure
to pass the Channing Layer.
So Kingman went back to his stock market machinations and applied
himself diligently. And as the days wore on, Kingman's group
manipulated their watered stock and ran the price up and down at will,
and after each cycle Kingman's outfit owned just one more bit of Venus
Equilateral.
Terran Electric would emerge from this battle with Venus Equilateral as
a subsidiary--with Kingman at the helm!
Walt Franks entered Channing's office with a wild-eyed look on his
face. "Don! C²!"
"Huh! What are you driving about?"
"C². The speed of light, squared!"
"Fast--but what is it?"
"The solar beam! It propagates at C²!"
"Oh, now look. Nothing can travel that fast!"
"Maybe this isn't _something_!"
"It has energy, energy has mass, mass cannot travel faster than the
limiting speed of light."
"O.K. It can't do it. But unless my measurements are all haywire, the
beam gets to Sol and back at C². I can prove it."
"Yeah? How? You couldn't possibly measure an interval so small as two
times sixty-seven million miles--the radius of Venus' orbit--traversed
at the speed of light, squared."
"No. I admit that. But, Don, I got power out of Sirius!"
"You WHAT?" yelled Channing.
"Got power out of Sirius. And unless I've forgotten how to use a
micro-clock, it figured out from here to Sirius and back with the bacon
in just about ninety-three percent of the speed of light squared.
Seven percent is well within the experimental error, I think, since we
think of Sirius as being eight and one-half light years away. That's
probably not too accurate as a matter of fact, but it's the figure I
used. But here we are. Power from Sirius at C². Thirty-five billion
miles per second! This stuff doesn't care how many laws it breaks!"
"Hm-m-m. C², hey? Oh, lovely. Look, Walt, let's run up and take a whirl
at Wes Farrell's detector. I'm beginning to envision person-to-person,
ship-to-ship service, and possibly the first Interplanet Network.
Imagine hearing a play-by-play account of the Solar Series!"
"Wool gathering," snorted Walt. "We've gotta catch our detector first!"
"Wes has something. First glimmer we've had. I think this is the time
to rush into it with all eight feet and start pushing!"
"O.K. Who do we want?"
"Same gang as usual. Chuck and Freddie Thomas, Warren, Wes Farrell, of
course, and you can get Jim Baler into it, too. No, Walt, Christine
Baler is not the kind of people you haul into a screwdriver meeting."
"I was merely thinking."
"I know. But you're needed, and if she were around, you'd be a total
loss as far as cerebration."
"I like her."
"So does Barney Carroll."
"Um! But he isn't here. O.K., no Christine in our conference. I'll
have Jeanne call the screwballs on the communicator."
They dribbled into Farrell's laboratory one by one, and then Don said:
"We have a detector. It is about as efficient as a slab of marble; only
more so. We can get a tinkle of about ten micromicroamps at twenty feet
distance from a driver tube using eight KVA input, which if we rate
this in the usual spaceship efficiency, comes to about one-half G.
That's about standard, for driver tubes, since they run four to a ship
at two G total.
"Now, that is peanuts. We should be able to wind a megammeter around
the peg at twenty feet. Why, the red ionization comes out of the tube
and hits our so-called detector, and the amount of ozone it creates is
terrific. Yet we can't get a good reading out of it."