Commodore Wilson eyed the spacecraft full of hastily assembled
instruments with a grimace. The ship was swarming with techs who were
peering into oscilloscopes, watching meters, and tinkering with signal
generators. A huge concave hemispherical dome above was a splatter of
little flickering green pinpoints and dark patches.
"This idea is hopelessly haywire," Wilson said unhappily.
"It sure is," said Space-Tech Maury Allison. "But everything is, at
first."
"You hope to make something out of it?"
"We hope," replied Allison. "We can't be sure."
"But surely this pile of junk has been tested before?"
Allison nodded.
"Any results?"
"Some. We've had as much as five minutes of constant operation out of
it."
As he spoke, the hemisphere over their heads flashed a full bright
green, then went black. A bell tinkled somewhere and a couple of techs
dropped their tools and headed for the back room on the double. A
couple of others stood up from their work and lit cigarettes because
their instruments had gone dead. Some of the rest continued to nurse
their particular circuits because that section was still running.
[Illustration: The dome became a riot of flaming green.]
After scanning the operation to see which section had gone blooey,
Allison went on. "We've never tested this outfit under anything
but ideal conditions. We've had spacecraft sent out to specified
distances, fired up the gizmo and found fragments of response right
where there should be a response."
"That's hardly fair, is it?" commented Wilson.
"It's a start. You have to start somewhere. Radio--know its start?
The first message was sent across the ocean a few hundred years ago
from one man to the other after they had made a complete plan as to
time, date, location and frequency, and also the transmitted message.
Sure enough, they got through. That, too, was under the ideal test
conditions. So when we finally assembled the half-a-hundred separate
circuits and devices that made it look as though we might have a space
detector, we put up targets, aimed our equipment, and looked for a
response where there should be one."
"We don't know where our target is," objected Wilson.
"And we haven't yet fired up this equipment to seek a target of unknown
position and range," admitted Allison. "But this gear is better than
nothing."
Again the green spots flickered in the dome over their heads.
"What do all those spots mean?" asked Wilson.
"Those are false targets, probably caused by background noise. Although
the infrawave is noiseless, we still seem to be getting it. Dr.
Friedrich disagrees. He claims this is not noise, but interferences.
However, the good doctor is not at all certain that the so-called
interferences come from localized conditions within the equipment or
from external sources."
Wilson shrugged. "I don't see how it's done with a radiation type that
has neither a directional quality nor a velocity of propagation."
"Do you understand Accum?"
"I stopped shortly before Matrix. Accumulative Math is so much pothooks
on a sheet of paper to me."
"Um. Then I'd find it hard to explain. The theory seems to be
demonstrable, and the accumulative mathematics upholds the
experimental evidence. But there hasn't yet been an acceptable verbal
description of what happens."
"I've often wondered, leaving the nondirectional quality out of it,
why we couldn't cut our emitting power and somehow compute range by
observing the incoming power from a distant infrawave transmitter."
Allison shook his head. "Oddly enough, the matrix mathematics that
deal with radiation shows that for any hypothetical radiation with an
infinite velocity of propagation, there can be no attenuation with
distance."
"Meaning that we should be able to transmit all the way from here to
hell and back."
"Not exactly. Infrawave radiation comes in quanta, you know. A kilowatt
covers two point one, seven nine three six plus parsecs. Two kilowatts
covers twice that distance minus the ninth root of two point, seven
nine three six plus. Three kilowatts covers three times two point et
cetera, minus two times the ninth root." Allison shrugged and spread
his hands.
* * * * *
"And so on it goes," he said, "indicating that at some devilish
distance--I've forgotten the figure but we had the master computer chew
it out on the big machine at Radiation once--an additional kilowatt
just shoves the signal coverage distance out by a micron. But if you
don't put in your honest kilowatt, you don't excite the infraspace that
carries infrawaves. And if you put in a kilowatt and a half, you have
to dissipate the half."
Wilson grunted. "Nice to have things come out even. Who'd have thunk
that the Creator wanted the Terran kilowatt to equal one quanta of
infrawave distance?"
Allison laughed. "Poor argument, Commodore Wilson. Actually, the figure
is point nine, eight three four plus. Close, but no cigar. We've
just come to accept the figure as a kilowatt, just as for everyday
calculation we accept the less refined figure of two point, one eight
parsecs, or even two point, two. At any rate--"
There was a puff of something, and a sound like the puncture of a tire.
The green speckles on the dome merged with one another and became
a riot of flaming green. There were shouts and cries and a lot of
haphazard orders and several techs scrambled to snap toggle switches.
Down the room one of the techs went head-first into a rack with a pair
of pliers and a soldering iron. He backed out carrying a smoking little
shapeless thing that had lost any character it once possessed. The tech
picked up a nice, shiny new doodad from a small box and went into the
rack again. When he came out this time he gave a hoarse cheer. Toggles
were snapped back and the spreckles reappeared.
One of the techs came up to Allison and said, "See that spot up there,
sir? The one just this side of the eighty-one degree longitude circle,
and a little below the forty-five latitude ring?"
"Yes."
It was a small round disc no more than an inch in diameter.
"We think that may be a response."