Chuck Thomas chimed in. "My semi-moronic brother will delay this
take-off if he doesn't sharpen up," he said. "What he means is: Seesee,
get it?"
"I get it," replied Channing.
And they did get it. Hour followed hour and day followed day from
take-off to turnover, where there was no Doppler effect even though the
velocity of the ship was fiercely high.
The hours fled by in a working flurry of tests and experiments and
almost-constant talk between the arrowing ship and Venus Equilateral....
* * * * *
"It doesn't add up," complained Walt Franks.
Christine looked up from her book and waited.
"Something's more'n we bargained for," he said.
"What?" asked Christine.
"Why, that area we're chilling off is cooling far too fast."
"I should think that would be an advantage," said Christine.
"Maybe--and maybe not," said Walt. "The big thing is that things should
behave according to rules. When they do not, then's when people make
discoveries that lead to new rules."
"That I don't follow," said Christine.
"Well, in this case we know to several decimal places the heat
equivalent of electrical energy. Three thousand, four hundred thirteen
kilowatt hours equals one B.T.U.--a British Thermal Unit. We know
the quantity of electrical power--the number of kilowatts--being
coursed through the tubes en route to Pluto. We know by calculation
just how many calories of heat there are in the area we're cooling
off--and therefore we can calculate the time it will take to reduce the
temperature of that area a given number of degrees centigrade. We're
about double."
"And--you were starting to explain something different," said Christine.
"Oh--yes. Well, for a number of years--several thousand, in fact--it
was taught that a heavy mass falls faster than a light mass. Then
Galileo tossed rocks off of the Tower at Pisa and showed that a small
stone and a large stone fall equally fast. That was a case where
definitely provable evidence was at variance with the rules. They
couldn't revise the actuality, so they had to revise the rules."
"I see. And now because that area is cooling off much faster than
anticipated, you anticipate that something is not behaving according to
the rules?"
"Bright girl," chuckled Walt.
"Thank you, kind sir," laughed Christine. "But remember that I was
raised in a bright family."
"Come on," said Walt. "We're going to investigate."
"In that cold room?" asked Christine with some concern.
Walt nodded. "You'll get used to it," he said absently, collecting a
few instruments.
"Look, Walt," said Christine in a scathing tone, "I'm used to it!
That's why I came to Venus Equilateral from Mars. Remember?"
Walt looked at her, wondering. But Christine wore a smile that took
most of the sting out of her words.
"Lead on, Walt. I can take a bit of chill. In fact," she said with a
half-smile, "under the proper circumstances, a bit of chill is fun."
Walt finished collecting his equipment and packed it into two carrying
cases. Then from a closet, he took electrically warmed clothing, helped
Christine into hers, climbed into his own, and then they took the long
trek along corridors and up elevators to the cold room.
"It's cold even here," said Christine.
"The room leaks bad," said Walt. "Wes Farrell's hobby these days is
making synthetic elements on the duplicator--he uses a filter to get a
mono-atomic pattern and then heterodynes the resulting signal to atomic
patterns above the transuranic system. But in all of Wes Farrell's
playing at making synthetic transuranic elements, he hasn't come up
with anything like a good heat insulator yet. We did toy with the idea
of hermetically sealing in a double wall and piping some of the vacuum
of interstellar space in there. But it was too vast a project. So we
let some heat leak and to hell with it."
Christine shuddered. "I've never really appreciated the fact that Venus
Equilateral is really just a big steel capsule immersed in the vacuum
of interplanetary space," she said. "It's so much like a town on Terra."
"Inside, that is," grinned Walt. "There's a nice queasy thrill awaiting
you when first you stand in an observation blister made of plastiglass."
"Why?" she asked.
"Because first you are terrified because you are standing on a bubble
that is eminently transparent and looking down beneath your feet,
you see the stars in the sky. You know that 'down' to the working
and residence section of the station is actually 'out and away' from
the axis of the station, since it revolves about the long axis to
provide a simulated gravity plus gyroscopic action to stabilize the
beam-stage and pointers. Well, when you go down--and again 'Down' is a
relative term meaning the direction of gravitic thrust--into one of the
blisters, your mind is appalled at the fact that your feet are pressing
against something that your eyes have always told you is 'up'. The
stars. And then you realize that between you and the awesome void of
space in just that thin glass.
"You end up," he grinned, "being very careful about banging your heels
on the floor of the station for about a week."
"Well thanks for the preparation," said Christine.
"You'll still go through it," he told her. "But just remember that
anybody on the other side of the station, standing in a similar
blister a mile 'above' your head, is standing feet 'upward' with
respect to you. But he, too, is being thrown out and away by
centrifugal force."
Walt put his equipment down and rummaged through it. He selected a
supersensitive thermocouple and bridge and fixed the couple to one of
the fixtures in the room. He balanced the bridge after the swinging
needle came to a halt--when the thermocouple junction had assumed the
temperature of the fixture. "Now," he said, "we'll read that at the end
of a half hour and we'll then calculate the caloric out-go and balance
it against the kilowatts heading out through the energy beam."
"And in the meantime?" asked Christine.
"In the meantime, we measure the electrical constants to within an
inch of their lives," he told her. "I've got a couple of real fancy
meters here--this one that I'm hooking across the original wattmeter
in the circuit measures the wattages in the region between one hundred
thousand kilowatts and one hundred ten thousand kilowatts. Designed
especially as a high-level meter."
Walt clipped the portable meters in place and made recordings. Finally
he nodded. "Right on the button," he said. "Just what the meters should
read."
The crystal began to vibrate faintly, and Walt mentioned that either
Wes Farrell was calling Freddie Thomas or vice versa. "Can't hear
it very well," complained Walt, "because Wes has the amplifiers
downstairs, both incoming amplifier from the dynamic pick-up--we had to
give up the standard crystal because it is expected to get cold enough
to make the crystal too brittle---to the modulating equipment. The
monitor-speaker is outside--we haven't been in here enough to make use
of it since our first tries."
Walt took a look at the bridge on the thermocouple and nodded vaguely.
He killed more time by showing Christine the huge tube that drained the
latent heat out of the room and hurled it across the solar system to
Pluto.
"Y'know," he grinned as a thought struck him, "I think we've licked the
Channing Layer that so neatly foiled Mark Kingman and Terran Electric
on that solar power project."
"Yes?"
"Sure," he said. "All we do is set up a real beam-input device on the
moon, for instance, and then use a batch of these things to draw the
power from there."
"But how about the formation of ozone?"
"That'll have to be checked," said Walt. "For Pluto hasn't got a
Channing Layer, of course, and our station out there is no criterion.
But you note there is no smell of ozone in here. That leads me to think
that w've given Terran Electric the runaround once more. Funny thing
about Kingman, if someone gave him this development, he'd never think
of reversing it to bring energy in."
"From what I know of the man," said Christine, "he'd not think of
reversing, but he would think of perverting."
"Christine!" shouted Walt.
"Huh?" asked the bewildered girl.
"You may have had your thought for the week!"
Walt tried a bit of Indian War Dance but failed because the
pseudo-gravitic force was too light to hold him down. They were too
close to the axis for full force.
"But I don't understand."
Walt laughed hugely and hugged her. Christine was lissome in the curve
of his arm as she relaxed against him.
Walt looked down at her for what seemed to be a long time while
the stream of highly-technical thinking and deduction gave way to
a series of more fundamental thoughts. Then he added his other arm
to the embrace, and Christine turned to face him. He kissed her
gently; experimentally--and discovered instead of resistance there
was co-operation. His kiss became fervent and Christine's lips parted
beneath his.
Some minutes later, Christine leaned back in his arms and smiled at
him affectionately. "I was wondering if you'd ever get around to that,"
she said softly.