[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science-Fiction, November 1943.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Walter Franks sat in the director's office; his feet on the director's
desk. He was smoking one of the director's cigarettes. He was drinking
the director's liquor, filched shamelessly from the director's private
filing cabinet where it reposed in the drawer marked "S." Drawer "B"
would have given beer, but Walt preferred Scotch.
He leaned forward and tossed the director's cigarette into the
director's wastebasket and then he pressed the button on the desk and
looked up.
But it was not the director's secretary who entered. It was his own,
but that did not disturb Franks. He knew that the director's secretary
was off on Mars enjoying a honeymoon with the director.
Jeanne entered and smiled. "Must you call me in here to witness you
wasting the company's time?" she asked in mock anger.
"Now look, Jeanne, this is what Channing does."
"No dice. You can't behave as Don Channing behaves. The reason is my
husband."
"I didn't call to have you sit on my lap. I want to know if the mail is
in."
"I thought so," she said. "And so I brought it in with me. Anything
more?"
"Not until you get a divorce," laughed Franks.
"You should live so long," she said with a smile. She stuck her tongue
out at him.
Walt thumbed his way through the mail, making notations on some, and
setting others aside for closer reading. He came to one and tossed it
across the desk at Jeanne. She took the message and read:
Dear Acting Director:
Having a wonderful honeymoon; glad you aren't here!
Don and Arden.
"Wonderful stuff, love," smiled Franks.
"It is," agreed Jeanne. A dreamy look came into her eyes.
"Scram, Jeanne. There are times when you can't work worth a darn.
Usually when you're thinking of that husband of yours. What's he got
that I haven't?"
"Me," said Jeanne slyly. She arose and started for the door. "Oh," she
said, "I almost forgot. Warren phoned up and said that the turret is
ready for a try-out."
"Fine," said Walt. "Swell." He unfolded himself from the chair with
alacrity and almost beat the girl to the door.
"My," she laughed, "you can move after all."
"Sure," he grinned. "Now I have something for which to live."
"I hope it's worth it. You've sunk a lot of change into that bug-house."
"I know, but we can stand it. After all, since Don took over this
affair, Interplanetary Communications is an up and running business.
We're out of the Government subsidy class now, and are making money. If
this works, we'll make more. It's worth a gamble."
"What are you trying to build?" asked Jeanne.
"Why, since this business of contacting ships-at-space has become so
universally liked, we have a tough time keeping ships in the mobile
beam. That's because they are always ducking out of the way of loose
meteorites and stuff, and that screws up their course. We can't see
'em, and must take their position on the basis of their expected
course. We never know whether we hit 'em until they land.
"Now I've been trying to devise a space gun that will blast meteors
directly instead of avoiding them by coupling the meteor detector to
the autopilot."
"Gonna shoot 'em out of existence?"
"Not exactly. Popping at them with any kind of a rifle would be like
trying to hit a flying bird with a spitball. Look, Jeanne, top speed
on the run from Mars to Terra at major opposition is up among the
thousands of miles per second at the turnover. A meteor itself may
be blatting along at fifty miles per second. Now a rifle, shooting
a projectile at a few thousand feet per second would be useless.
You'd have the meteor in your lap and out of the other side while
the projectile is making up its mind to move forward and relieve the
pressure that is building up behind it due to the exploding powder.
"I've designed an electron gun. It is a superpowered, oversized edition
of the kind they used to use in kinescope tubes, oscilloscope tubes,
and electron microscopes. Since the dingbat is to be used in space,
we can leave the works of the gun open and project a healthy stream
of electrons at the offending object without their being slowed and
dispersed by an impending atmosphere."
"But that sounds like shooting battleships with a toy gun."
"Not so fast on the objections, gal," said Franks. "I've seen a simple
oscilloscope tube with a hole in the business end. It was burned right
through a quarter inch of glass because the fellows were taking pix and
had the intensity turned up high. The sweep circuit blew a fuse and the
beam stopped on one spot. That was enough to puncture the screen."
"I see. That was just a small affair?"
"A nine-inch tube. The electron gun in a nine-inch kinescope tube is
only about four inches long and three quarters of an inch in diameter.
Mine, out there in the turret, is six feet in diameter and thirty feet
long. I can fire out quite a bundle of electrons from a tube of that
size."
"It sounds as though you mean business."
"I do. This is the right place to do research of that kind. Out here on
Venus Equilateral, we're in a natural medium for an electron gun, and
we've the power requirements to run it. I can't think of any place in
the System that offers better chances."
"When are you going to try it out?"
"As soon as a meteor comes over the pike, as long as Warren says we're
ready."
Jeanne shook her head. "I wish Channing were here. Things are wild
enough when you are both working on something screwball, but I could
get scared something fierce at the thought of either one of you working
without the other."
"Why?"
"You two sort of act as balance wheels to one another's craziness. Oh,
don't take that word to heart. Everybody on the Relay Station thinks
the world of you two, myself included. _Craziness_ in this case means a
sort of friendly description of the way your brains work. Both of you
dash off on tangents now and then, and when either one of you get off
the beam, the other one seems to swing the weight required to bring the
lost one back to the fold."
"That's a real mess of mixed metaphors, Jeanne. But I am going to
surprise Don hairless when he gets back here and finds that I've done
what people claimed couldn't be done. I'm going to be the bird whose
bust sits in the Hall of Fame in between Edison, Einstein, Alexander
Graham Bell, S. F. B. Morse, and--"
"Old Man River, Jack Frost, and Little Boy Blue," laughed Jeanne. "I
hope it's not a bust, Walt."
"You mean I should have a whole statue?"
"I mean, I hope your dream is not a bust!"
* * * * *
Jeanne left, with Walt right behind her. Franks did not remain at the
desk, however, but made his way from the office level to the outer skin
of the Relay Station by way of a not-often-used stairway that permitted
him to drop to the outer skin. Above his head were the first levels of
apartmental cubicles occupied by the personnel of Venus Equilateral.
Out here, Walt had but a scant thickness of steel between him and the
void of space.
His pathway was strewn with pipe, cable, and storage tanks. He passed
a long-forgotten project and paused to reminisce over the days when
a meteor shower had caused them some concern by puncturing the skin
twice. The installation of a sponge elastomer under compression in
this space had been stopped when a brilliant astrophysicist proved to
Channing--then a supervisor in the operations laboratory--that the
chances of being dangerously punctured were practically nil, and that
the actual puncturing had done nothing but make people uncomfortably
leery.
Then Franks came to a room built from outer skin to inner skin and
about fifty feet in diameter. He unlocked the door with a key on his
watch chain, and entered. Jim Warren was waiting for him.
"Hi, ordnance expert. We're ready as soon as they are."
"How's she working?"
"I should know? We've been squirting ropes of electrons out to blank
space for hours. She gets rid of them all right. But have we done any
good? I dunno."
"Not a meteor in sight, I suppose."
"The detector hasn't blinked once. But when she does, your electron gun
will follow the darned thing until it gets a half thousand miles out of
sight, or will pick it up a thousand miles before it gets here."
"That sounds fine. It's a good thing that we don't have to swivel that
mess of tube around a whole arc in actual use. It would take too long.
But we'll put one in each upper quadrant of a spaceship and devise it
so that its working arc will be small enough to make it work. Time
enough to find that out after we know if it works."
"That's something that I've been wondering about," said Warren. "Why
didn't we build a small one out here and evacuate the skin for a few
hundred feet? We could set up a few chunks of iron and squirt electrons
at 'em."
"And have the folks upstairs screaming? Nope. I've a hunch that when
this beam hits something hard, it will create quite a ruckus. It would
be fine to have a hunk blown right out of the skin, wouldn't it?"
"Guess you're right," admitted Warren.
The meteor alarm flashed, and a bell dinged once.
"Here's our chance," snapped Walt. "We've about fifteen seconds to work
on this one."
He looked out of a tiny window, and saw that the big tube had lined up
with the tiny model that was a monitor for the big tube. He sighted
through the model, which in itself was a high-powered telescope, and he
saw the jagged meteor rushing forward at an angle to the Station. It
would miss by miles, but it would offer a good target.
"Cathode's hot," said Warren.
Walt Franks grasped the power switch and thrust it down part way.
Meters leaped up their scales and from somewhere there came the
protesting whine of tortured generators. Through the window, nothing
very spectacular was happening. The cathode glowed slightly brighter
due to the passage of current through its metal and out of the coated
surface. But the electrostatic stresses that filled the gaps between
the accelerator and focusing anodes was no more visible than the
electricity that runs a toy motor. Its appearance had not changed a
bit, but from the meters, Walt Franks knew that megawatts of electronic
power, in the shape of high-velocity electrons, was being poured from
the cathode; accelerated by the ring anodes; and focused to a narrow
beam by the focusing anodes. And from the end of the framework that
supported these anodes, a cylinder of high-velocity electrons poured
forth, twelve inches in diameter.
Through the telescope, the meteor did not seem to be disturbed. It
exploded not, neither did it melt. It came on inexorably, and if the
inanimate nickel and iron of a meteor can be said to have such, it came
on saucily and in utter disregard for the consequences.
Frantically, Walt cranked the power up higher and higher, and the
lights all over the Station dimmed as the cathode gun drained the
resources of the Station.
Still no effect.
Then in desperation, Walt slammed the power lever down to the bottom
notch. The girders strained in the tube from the terrific electrostatic
stresses, and for a second, Walt was not certain that the meteor was
not finally feeling the effects of the electron bombardment.
He was not to be sure, for the experiment came to a sudden stop.
An insulator arced where it led the high-voltage lines that fed the
anodes through the wall. Immediately it flashed over, and the room
filled to the brim with the pungent odor of burning insulation. A
medium-voltage anode shorted to one of the high-voltage anodes, and
the stress increased in the tube. It broke from its moorings, this
low-voltage anode, and it plunged backward, down the tube toward the
cathode. It hit, and it was enough to jar the whole tube backward on
its gimbals.
The shock warped the mounting of the tube, and it flexed slightly, but
sufficiently to bring the farthermost and highest voltage anode into
the electron stream. It glowed redly, and the secondary emission raved
back through the series of electrodes, heating them and creating more
warpage.
Then the pyrotechnic stopped. Great circuit breakers crashed open up in
the power room hundreds of feet above them, high in the Station.
Walt Franks looked out through the window at the tangled mess that
had been a finely machined piece of equipment. He saw the men looking
quizzically at him as he turned away from the window, and with a smile
that cost him an effort, he said: "All right, so Marconi didn't get WLW
on his first try, either. Come on, fellows, and we'll clean up this
mess."
With the utter disregard that inanimate objects show toward the inner
feelings of the human being, the meteor alarm blinked again and the
bell rang. The pilot tube swiveled quickly to one side, lining up
with the spot in the celestial globe of the meteor detector. Out in
the turret that housed the big tube, motors strived against welded
commutators and the big tube tried to follow.
Walt looked at the pointing tube and said: "All right! Go ahead and
point!"
* * * * *
Don Channing smiled at Arden. "Mrs. Channing," he said, "must you
persist in keeping me from my first love?"
Arden smiled winningly. "Naturally. That's what I'm here for. I intend
to replace your first love entirely and completely."
"Yeah," drawled Don, "and what would we live on?"
"I'll permit you to attend to your so-called first love during eight
hours every day, providing that you remember to think of me every
half-hour."
"That's fine. But you really aren't fair about it. We were on Terra
for two weeks. I was just getting interested in a program outlined by
one of the boys that works for Interplanet, and what happened? You
hauled me off to Mars. We stayed for a week at the Terraland Hotel at
Canalopsis and the first time that Keg Johnson came to see us with an
idea and a sheaf of papers, you rushed me off to Lincoln Head. Now I'm
scared to death that some guy will try to open a blueprint here; at
which I'll be rushed off to the Palanortis Country until someone finds
us there. Then it'll be the Solar Observatory on Mercury or the Big
Glass on Luna."
Arden soothed Don's feelings by sitting on his lap and snuggling.
"Dear," she said in a voice that positively dripped, "we're on a
honeymoon, remember?"
Don stood up, dumping Arden to the floor. "Yeah," he said, "but this is
the highest velocity honeymoon that I ever took!"
"And it's the first one I was ever on where the bridegroom took more
time admiring beam installations than he took to whisper sweet nothings
to his gal. What has a beam transmitter got that I haven't got?"
"One: Its actions can be predicted. Two: It can be controlled. Three:
It never says anything original, but only repeats what it has been
told. Four: It can be turned off."
Arden caught Don on the point of the chin with a pillow and effectively
smothered him. She followed her slight advantage with a frontal attack
that carried him backward across the bed, where she landed on top
viciously and proceeded to lambaste him with the other pillow.
It was proceeding according to plan, this private, good-natured war,
until a knock on the door caused a break in operations. Channing
struggled out from beneath Arden and went to the door trying to comb
his hair by running spread fingers through it. He went with a sense
of failure caused by Arden's quiet laugh and the statement that he
resembled a bantam rooster.
* * * * *
The man at the door apologized, and then said: "I'm Doug Thomas of the
_Triworld News_."
"Come in," said Don, "and see if you can find a place to sit."
"Thanks."
"I didn't know that _Triworld News_ was interested in the wedded life
of the Channings. Why doesn't _Triworld_ wait until we find out about
it ourselves?"
"_Triworld_ does not care to pry into the private life of the newly wed
Channing family," laughed Doug. "We, and the rest of the System do not
give a damn whether Mrs. Channing calls you Bunny-bit or Sugar-pie--"
"Sweetums," corrected Arden with a gleam in her eye.
"--we've got something big to handle. I can't get a thing out of the
gang at Canalopsis, they're all too busy worrying."
"And so you came here? What do you expect to get out of us? We're not
connected in any way with Canalopsis."
"I know," said Doug, "but you do know space. Look, Channing, the _Solar
Queen_ has been missing since yesterday morning!"
Don whistled.
"See what I mean? What I want to know is this: What is your opinion on
the matter? You've lived in space for years, on the Relay Station, and
you've had experience beyond anybody I can reach."
"Missing since yesterday morning," mused Channing. "That means trouble."
"That's what I thought. Now if you were running the spaceport at
Canalopsis, what would your own private opinion be?"
"I don't know whether I should speak for publication," said Don.
"It won't be official. I'll corroborate anything you say before it is
printed, and so on. But I want an unofficial opinion, too. If you
want this withheld, say so, but I still want a technical deduction to
base my investigation on. I don't understand the ramifications and the
implications of a missing ship. It is enough to make Keg Johnson's hair
turn gray overnight, though, and I'd like to know what is so bad before
I start to turn stones."
"Well, keep it off the record until Canalopsis gives you the go-ahead.
I can give you an opinion, but I don't want to sound official."
"O.K. Do you suppose she was hit by a meteor shower?"
"Doubt it like the devil. Meteor detectors are many and interconnected
on a spaceship, as well as being alarmed and fused to the nth degree.
Any trouble with them will bring a horde of ringing bells all through
the ship which would bring the personnel a-running. They just don't go
wrong for no reason at all."
"Suppose that so many meteors came from all directions that the factors
presented to the autopilot--"
"No dice. The possibility of a concentration of meteors from all
directions all about to pass through a certain spot in space is
like betting on two Sundays in a row. Meteors don't just run in all
directions, they have a general drift. And the meteor detecting
equipment would have been able to pick up the centroid of any group of
meteors soon enough to lift the ship around it. Why, there hasn't been
a ship hit by a meteor in ten years."
"But--"
"And if it had been," continued Channing, "the chances are more than
likely that the ship wouldn't have been hit badly enough to make it
impossible to steer, or for the crew to shoot out message tubes which
would have landed on Canalopsis."
"Suppose that the ship ducked a big shower and it went so far out of
course that they missed Mars?"
"That's out, too," laughed Channing.
"Why?"
"A standard ship of space is capable of hitting it up at about 4-G all
the way from Terra to Mars at major opposition and end up with enough
power and spare cathodes to continue on to Venus in quadrature. Now the
velocity of the planets in their orbits is a stinking matter of miles
per second, while the top speed of a ship in even the shortest passage
runs up into four figures per second. You'd be surprised at what
velocity you can attain at 1-G for ten hours."
"Yes?"
"It runs to slightly less than two hundred and fifty miles per second,
during which you've covered only four million miles. In the shortest
average run from Venus to Terra at conjunction, a skimpy twenty-five
million miles, your time of travel is a matter of twenty-five hours
add, running at the standard 2-G. Your velocity at turnover--or the
halfway point where the ship stops going up from Terra and starts to
go down to Venus--is a cool five hundred miles per second. So under no
condition would the ship miss its objective badly enough to cause its
complete loss. Why, this business is run so quickly that were it not
for the saving in time and money that amounts to a small percentage
at the end of each flight, the pilot could head for his planet and
approach the planet asymptotically."
"You know what you're doing, don't you?" asked the reporter.
"I think so."
"You're forcing my mind into accepting something that has never
happened before, and something that has no basis for its--"
"You mean piracy? I wonder. We've all read tales about the Jolly Roger
being painted on the side of a sleek ship of space while the pirate,
who at heart is a fine fellow though uninhibited, hails down the
cruiser carrying radium. He swipes the stuff and kisses all the women
whilst menacing the men with a gun hand full of searing, coruscating,
violently lethal ray pistol. But that sounds fine in stories. The trick
is tougher than it sounds, Thomas. You've got to catch your rabbit
first."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that finding a ship in space to prey upon is somewhat less
difficult than juggling ten billiard balls whilst riding a horse
blind-folded. Suppose you were to turn pirate. This is what would
happen:
"You'd get the course of the treasure ship from the spaceport, fine and
good, by resorting to spies and such. You'd lie in wait out there in
the blackness of space, fixing your position by the stars and hoping
that your error in fix was less than a couple of thousand miles. It's
more likely to be a hundred thousand miles, though. The time comes.
You look to your musket, sharpen your sword, and see to the priming of
your Derringers that are thrust into the red sash at your waist. You
are right on the course, due to your brilliant though lawless navigator
who was tossed out of astrogator's school for filching the teacher's
whiskey. Then the treasure ship zoops past at a healthy hundred miles
per second and you decide that since she is hitting it up at 2-G, you'd
have to start from scratch at a heck of a lot better to catch her
within the next couple of light years.
"So you give up, join the Congregational Church and pass the collection
plate every Sunday."
"But suppose you took the course as laid and applied the same
acceleration? Suppose you followed on the heels of your quarry until
you were both in space? You could do it then, couldn't you?"
"Gosh," said Channing, "I never thought of that. That's the only way
a guy could pirate a ship--unless he planted his men aboard and they
mutinied."
"Then it might be pirates?"
"It might be," admitted Channing. "It'd have to occur near beginning
or end, of course, though. I can't think of anything safer than being
shot at out of a gun of any kind while both crates are hitting it up at
a couple of hundred miles per second and at a distance of a few miles
apart. It would be all right if you were both running free, but at 2-G
acceleration, you'd have to do quite a bit of ballistic gymnastics to
score a hit."
"Or run in front of your quarry and sow a bouquet of mines."
"Except that the meteor detector would show the position of the pirate
craft in the celestial globe and the interconnecting circuits would
cause the treasure ship to veer off at a sharp angle. Shucks, Doug,
this thing has got too many angles to it. I can't begin to run it off
either way. No matter how difficult it may sound, there are still ways
and means to do it. The one thing that stands out like a sore thumb
is the fact that the _Solar Queen_ has turned up missing. Since no
inanimate agency could cause failure, piracy is the answer."
"You're sure of that?"
"Not positive. There are things that might cause the ship to founder.
But what they are depend upon too many coincidences. It's like hitting
a royal flush on the deal, or filling a full house from two pair."
"Well, thanks, Channing. I'm heading back to Canalopsis right now. Want
to come along?"
Channing looked at Arden, who was coming from the dressing room
carrying her coat and he nodded. "The gal says yes," he grinned. "Annoy
her until I find my shoes, will you?"
Arden wrinkled her nose at Don. "I'll like that," she said to Doug.
The trip from Lincoln Head to Canalopsis was a fast one. Doug Thomas
drove the little flier through the thin air of Mars at a breakneck
speed and covered the twelve hundred miles in just shy of two hours. At
the spaceport, Channing found that he was not denied the entrance as
the reporter had been. He was ushered into the office of Keg Johnson in
record time, and the manager of the Canalopsis Spaceport greeted Don
with a worried expression on his face.
"Still gone," he said cryptically. "Like the job of locating her?"
Don shook his head with a sympathetic smile. "Like trying to find a
grain of sand on a beach--a specified grain, I mean. Wouldn't know how
to go about it."
Keg nodded. "I thought as much. That leaves her out of the picture.
Well, up to now space travel has been about as safe as spending the
evening in your easy-chair. Hello, Arden, how's married life?"
"Can't tell yet," she said with a twinkle. "I've got to find out
whether I can break him of a dozen bad habits before I'll commit
myself."
"I wish you luck, Arden, although from that statement, it's Don that
needs the luck."
"We came to see if there was anything we could do about the _Solar
Queen_," offered Channing.
"What can anybody do?" asked Keg with spread hands. "About all we can
do is to put it down in our remembrances and turn to tomorrow. Life
goes on, you know," said Keg in a resigned tone, "and either we keep
up or we begin to live in the past. Are you going to stay here for a
day or two?"
"Was thinking about it," said Don.
"Well, suppose you register at the Terraland and meet me back here for
lunch. If anything occurs, I'll shoot you a quickie." Keg looked at his
watch and whistled. "Lordy," he said ruefully. "I didn't know how late
it was. Look, kids, I'll run you downtown myself, and we'll all have
lunch at the Terraland. How's that?"
"Sounds better," admitted Channing. "My appetite, you know."
"I know," laughed Arden. "Come on, meat-eater, and we'll peel a calf."
It was during lunch that a messenger raced into the dining room and
handed Keg a letter. Keg read, and then swore roundly. He tossed the
letter across the table to Don and Arden.
To the Operators of all Spacelines:
It has come to my attention that your ships require protection.
The absence of the _Solar Queen_ is proof enough that your
efforts are insufficient to insure the arrival of a spaceship
at its destination.
I am capable of offering protection at the reasonable rate of one
dollar solarian for every gross ton, with the return of ten dollars
solarian if any ship fails to come through safely. I think that you
may find it necessary to subscribe to my insurance, since without
my protection I cannot be responsible for failures.