Walt wondered whether he should have questioned Wes about that remark,
but he did not. Several hours later, he wondered how Wes could have
been so right.
* * * * *
Venus Equilateral, Preferred, started in its long climb as soon as
the markets opened on the following day. Cartwright, following his
orders and his experience, held onto whatever stock he had, and bought
whatever stock was tossed his way. Several times he was on the verge of
asking Interplanetary Transport for monetary assistance, but the real
need never materialized.
Kingman alternately cursed the whining music and cheered the pyramiding
stock. About the only thing that kept Kingman from going completely mad
was the fact that the alien music was not continuous, but it came and
went in stretches of anything from five to fifty minutes, with varied
periods for silence in between selections.
Up and up it went, and Kingman was seeing the final, victorious coup
in the offing. A week more, and Venus Equilateral would belong to
Terran Electric. The beam from Terra was silent, save for a few items
of interest not connected with the market. Kingman's men were given
the latest news, baseball scores, and so forth, among which items was
another message to Channing from the solar beam project engineer,
Addison. They had about given up. Nothing they could do would prevent
the formation of ozone by the ton as they drew power by the kilowatt
from Sol.
On Venus Equilateral, Channing said: "Ask Freddie what his radio
frequency is."
Ten minutes later, at the speed of light, the ship beam reached the
_Relay Girl_ and the message clicked out. Freddie read it and spoke
into the microphone. The _Relay Girl_ bucked unmercifully, as the voice
amplitude made the acceleration change. Then at the speed of light,
squared, the answer came back in less than a twinkle.
"Seventeen hundred kilocycles."
Channing began to turn the tuner of the radio receiver. The band
was dead, and he laughed. "This is going to be tricky, what with
the necessity of aligning both the driver-alloy disk and the radio
receiver. Takes time."
He changed the alloy disk in minute increments, and waved the tuner
across that portion of the band that would most likely cover the
experimental error of Freddie Thomas' frequency measurement. A burst
of sound caught his ear, was lost for a moment, and then swelled into
perfect tune as Don worked over the double tuning system.
"Whoa, Tillie," said Walt. "That sounds like--"
"Like hell."
"Right. Just what I was going to say. Is it music?"
"Could be. I've got a slightly tin ear, you know."
"Mine is fair," said Walt, "but it might as well be solid brass as far
as this mess is concerned. It's music of some kind, you can tell it by
the rhythm. But the scale isn't like anything I've ever heard before."
"Might be a phonograph record played backward," suggested Wes.
"I doubt it," said Channing seriously. "The swell of that orchestra
indicates a number of instruments--of some cockeyed kind or other--the
point I'm making is that anything of a classical or semi-classical
nature played backwards on a phonograph actually sounds passable. I
can't say the same for jamstead music, but it holds for most of the
classics, believe it or not. This sounds strictly from hunger."
"Or hatred. Maybe the musicians do not like one another."
"Then they should lambaste one another with their instruments, not
paste the sub-ether with them."
Channing lit a cigarette. "Mark the dial," he said. "Both of 'em. I've
got to get in touch with the Thomas Boys."
Walt marked the dials and tuned for the _Relay Girl_. He found it
coming in not far from the other setting. Chuck was speaking, and they
tuned in near the middle of his speech.
"--this thing so that it will not buck like a scenic railway
finding the fourth derivative of space with respect to time. For my
non-technical listeners, that is none other than the better known term:
Jerkiness. We applied the modulation to the first driver anode--the
little circular one right above the cathode. I don't know whether this
is getting out as it should, so I'm going to talk along for the next
fifteen minutes straight until I hear from you. Then we're switching
over and repeating. Can you hear me?"
Channing cut the gain down to a whisper and put a message on the beam,
confirming his reception. Ten minutes later, Chuck changed his set
speech, and said: "Good! Too bad we haven't got one of those receivers
here, or we could make this a two-way with some action. Now listen,
Don. My idiot brother says that he can make the beam transmit without
the drive. Unfortunately, I am not a drive expert like he is and so I
can not remonstrate with the half-wit. So, and right now, we're cutting
the supply voltage to the final focussing anode. Whoops! I just floated
off the floor and the mike cable is all tangled up in my feet. This
free stuff is not as simple as the old fiction writers claimed it was.
Things are floating all over the place like mad. The accelerometer says
exactly zero, and so you tell me if we are getting out. We're going
back on one G so that we can sit down again. That's better! Though the
idiot--it's a shame to be forced to admit that one of your family is
half-witted--didn't wait until we were in position to fall. I almost
landed on my head--which is where he was dropped as an infant. How was
it? Did you hear my manly voice whilst we were going free? Say 'No' so
that my idiot brother will not have anything to say about his brilliant
mind. I'm out of breath and we're going back home on that home
recording of Freddie saying, and I will let him quote, via acetate."
The sound of a phonograph pick-up being dropped on a record preceded
Freddie's voice saying: "One, two, three, four, test, one--"
Channing cut the gain again. "That red-hot. I thought he was talking
all this time."
"Not the Thomas Boys. That comes under the classification of 'Work'
which they shun unless they cannot get any kind of machine to do it for
them," laughed Walt.
Walt turned the dials back to the unearthly symphony. "At C², that
might come from Sirius," he said, listening carefully. "Sounds like
Chinese."
"Oh, now look," objected Don. "What on earth would a Chinese Symphony
be doing with a driver modulator system?"
"Broadcasting--"
"Nope. The idea of detecting driver radiation is as old as the hills.
If any culture had uncovered driver-beam transmission we'd all have
been aware of it. So far as I know, we and the Terran Electric crowd
are the only ones who have had any kind of an opportunity of working
with this sub-etheric energy. Wes, have you another miniature of the
relay tube handy?"
"Sure. Why?"
"I'm going to see if this stuff can be made directional. You're
bringing whatever it is into the place on a collector plate and
slamming it into an input-terminal power transmission tube. It goes
across the table to the relay tube, and is amplified, and then is
tossed across more table to the load-terminal tube, where the output is
impressed across your alloy-disk. Right?"
"Right."
"I want another relay tube. I'm going to use it for a directional
input-beam, aligning it in the same way that Jim Baler and Barney
Carroll did their first find. The one that sucked power out of the
electric light, turned off the city hall, and so on. Follow?"
"Perfectly. Yes, I've got a couple of them. But they're not connected
like Walt's set-up was."
"Well, that three-tube system was built on sheer guesswork some time
ago. We can tap in the relay tube and haul out a set of cables that
will energize the first relay tube. Hang her on gimbals, and we'll go
hunting."
"Shall I have Freddie return?"
"Yes. We'll have Warren's gang build us up about six of these things
just as we have here."
"That won't take long," said Walt. "They're working on the tuning disks
now, and we should have 'em by the time that Freddie gets back here."
"But this wild and wooly music. It's alien."
Wes turned from the teletype and dug in the cabinet for the extra
relay tube. He up-ended the chassis containing Walt's set-up and began
to attach leads to the voltage supply, cabling them neatly and in
accordance with the restrictions on lead-capacities that some of the
anodes needed.
"It's alien," said Wes in agreement. "I'm going to shut it off now
whilst I tinker with the tube."
"Wait a minute," said Don. "Here comes Jim. Maybe he'd like to hear it."
"Hear what?" asked Jim Baler entering the door.
"We've a Sirian Symphony," explained Don, giving Jim the background all
the way to the present time. Jim listened, and then said:
"As an engineer, I've never heard anything like that in my life
before. But, as a student of ancient languages and arts and sciences, I
have. That's Chinese."
"Oh, no!"
"Oh, yes, but definitely."
"Ye gods!"
"I agree."
"But how--where?"
"And/or when?"
Channing sat down hard. He stared at the wall for minutes. "Chinese.
Oh, great, slippery, green, howling catfish!" He picked up the phone
and called the decoupler room where the messages were sorted as to
destination upon their entry into the station.
"Ben? Look, have we a ship beam on anything of Chinese registry?"
Ben said wait a minute while he checked. He returned and said: "Four.
_The Lady of Cathay_, _The Mandarin's Daughter_, _The Dragoness_, and
_The Mongol Maid_. Why?"
"Put a message on each of 'em, asking whether they have any Chinese
music on board."
"And then what? They can't answer."
"Make this an experimental request. If any of them are using any
recordings of Chinese music, tell them to have their electronics chief
replace the phonograph pick-up with a microphone--disturbing absolutely
nothing--and to reply as if we could hear them: Get me?"
"Can you? Hear 'em I mean."
"We hear something, and Jim says it's Chinese."
"It's worth a try, then. See you later."
"Will they?" asked Jim, interested in the workings of this idea.
"Sure. Ever since we steered the _Empress of Kolain_ out of the grease
with the first station-to-ship beam, all three of the interplanetary
companies have been more than willing to co-operate with any of our
requests as long as we precede the message with the explanation that
it's experimental. They'll do anything we ask 'em to, short of
scuttling the ship."
"Nice hookup. Hope it works."
"So do I," said Wes. "This, I mean. I've got our directional gadget
hooked up."
"Turn it on."
The wailing of the music came in strong and clear. Wes turned the input
tube on its support, and the music passed through a loud peak and died
off on the far side to almost zero. Wes adjusted the mobile tube for
maximum response and tightened a small set-screw. "It's a shame we
haven't got a nice set of protractors and gimbals," said Wes. "I had to
tear into the desk lamp to get that flexible pipe."
"Small loss. She's directional, all right. We'll get the gimbals later.
Right now I don't want this turned off because we may hear something
interesting--whoops, it went off by itself!"
"Could we dare to hope?" asked Walt.
"Let's wait. They'll have to hitch the microphone on."
"Give 'em a half hour at least."
Twenty minutes later, a strange voice came through the speaker.
"Dr. Channing, of Venus Equilateral? We have been contacted by your
organization with respect to the possibility of your being able to hear
the intership communicator system. This seems impossible, but we are
not ones to question. The fact that you are in possession of the facts
concerning our love of the music of our ancestors is proof enough that
you must have heard something. I presume that further information is
desired, and I shall wait for your return. This is Ling Kai Chaing,
Captain of the _Lady of Cathay_."
"We got it!" chortled Don. He did a war dance in the lab, and the rest
followed suit. Bits of wire and oddments of one sort or another filled
the air as the big, grown-up men did a spring dance and strewed the
floor with daintily thrown junk. At the height of the racket, Arden
and Christine entered--no, they were literally hauled in, completely
surrounded, and almost smothered.