"CHANNING AND FRANKS AT WORK ON CONTACTING THE EMPRESS OF KOLAIN. WILL DO OUR BEST.VENUS EQUILATERAL."
"CHANNING AND FRANKS AT WORK ON CONTACTING THE EMPRESS OF KOLAIN. WILL DO OUR BEST.
VENUS EQUILATERAL."
Unknowing of the storm, theEmpress of Kolainsped silently through the void, accelerating constantly at one G. Hour after hour she was adding to her velocity, building it up to a speed that would make the trip in days, and not weeks. Her drivers flared dull red no more, for there was no atmosphere for the ionic stream to excite. Her few portholes sparkled with light, but they were nothing in comparison to the starry curtain of the background.
Her hull was of a neutral color, and though the sun glanced from her metal flanks, a reflection from a convex side is not productive of a beam of light. It spreads according to the degree of convexity and is lost.
What constitutes an apparent absence? The answer to that question is the example of a ship in space flight. TheEmpress of Kolaindid not radiate anything detectable in the electromagnetic scale from ultralong waves to ultra-high frequencies; nothing at all that could be detected at any distance beyond a few thousand miles. The sweep of her meteor-spotting equipment would pass a spot in micro-micro-seconds at a hundred miles; at the distance from Venus Equilateral the sweep of the beam would be so fleeting that the best equipment ever known or made would have no time to react, thus missing the signal.
Theorists claim a thing unexistent if it cannot be detected. TheEmpress of Kolainwas invisible. It was undetectable to radio waves. It was in space, so no physical wave could be transmitted to be depicted as sound. Its mass was inconsiderable. Its size as cosmic sizes go was comparatively sub-microscopic, and therefore it would occult few, if any, stars. Therefore, to all intents and purposes, theEmpress of Kolainwas non-existent, and would remain in that state of material-non-being until it came to life again upon its landing at Venus.
Yet theEmpress of Kolainexisted in the minds of the men who were to find her. Like the shot unseen, fired from a distant cannon, theEmpress of Kolainwas coming at them with ever-mounting velocity, its unseen course a theoretical curve.
And the ship, like the projectile, would land if the men who knew of her failed in their purpose.
Don Channing and Walt Franks found their man in the combined dining room and bar—the only one in sixty million miles. They surrounded him, ordered a sandwich and beer, and began to tell him their troubles.
Charles Thomas listened for about three minutes. "Boy," he grinned, "being up in that shiny, plush-lined office has sure done plenty to your think-tank, Don."
Channing stopped talking. "Proceed," he said. "In what way has my perspective been warped?"
"You talk like Burbank," said Thomas, mentioning a sore spot of some months past. "You think a mass detector would work at this distance? Nuts, fellow. It might, if there were nothing else in the place to interfere. But you want to shoot out near Mars. Mars is on the other side of the Sun—and Evening Star to anyone on Terra. You want us to shoot a slap-happy beam like a mass detector out past Sol; and then a hundred and forty million miles beyond in the faint hope that you can triangulate upon a little mite of matter; a stinking six hundred-odd feet of aluminum hull mostly filled with air and some machinery and so on. Brother, what do you think all the rest of the planets will do to your piddling little beam? Retract, or perhaps abrogate the law of universal gravitation?"
"Crushed," said Franks with a sorry attempt at a smile.
"Phew!" agreed Channing. "Maybe I should know more about mass detectors."
"Forget it," said Thomas. "The only thing that mass detectors are any good for is to conjure up beautiful bubble dreams, which anyone who knows about 'em can break with the cold point of icy logic."
"What would you do?" asked Channing.
"Darned if I know. We might flash 'em with a big mirror—if we had a big mirror and they weren't heading into the Sun."
"Let's see," said Franks, making tabulations on the tablecloth. "They're a couple of hundred million miles away. In order that your mirror present a recognizable disk, it should be about twice the diameter of Venus as seen from Terra. That's eight thousand miles in—at the least visibility—say, eighty million or a thousand-to-one ratio. TheEmpress of Kolainis heading at us from some two hundred million miles, so at a thousand-to-one ratio our mirror would have to be twenty thousand miles across. Some mirror!"
Don tipped Walt's beer over the edge of the table, and while the other man was busy mopping up and muttering unprintables, Don said to Thomas: "This is serious and it isn't. Nobody's going to lose their skin if we don't, but a problem has been put to us and we're going to crack it if we have to skin our teeth to do it."
"You can't calculate their position?"
"Sure. Within a couple of hundred thousand miles we can. That isn't close enough."
"No, it isn't," agreed Chuck.
Silence fell for a moment. It was broken by Arden, who came in waving a telegram. She sat down and appropriated Channing's glass, which had not been touched. Don opened the sheet and read: "Have received confirmation of your effort. I repeat, spare no expense!" It was signed: "Keg Johnson, Interplanet."
"Does that letter offer mean anything to you?" asked Arden.
"Sure," agreed Don. "But at the same time we're stumped. Should we be doing anything?"
"Anything, I should think, would be better than what you're doing at present. Or does that dinner-and-beer come under 'expenses'?"
Arden stood up, tossed Channing's napkin at him, and started toward the door. Channing watched her go, his hand making motions on the tablecloth. His eyes fell to the table and he took Franks' pencil and drew a long curve from a spot of gravy on one side of the table to a touch of coffee stain on the other. The curve went through a bit of grape jelly near the first stain.
"Here goes the tablecloth strategist," said Franks. "What now, little man?"
"That spot of gravy," explained Don, "is Mars. The jelly is theEmpress of Kolain. Coffee stain is Venus, and up here by this cigarette burn is Venus Equilateral. Get me?"
"Yop, that's clear enough."
"Now it would be the job for seventeen astronomers for nine weeks to predict the movements of this jelly spot with respect to the usual astral standards. But, fellows, we know the acceleration of theEmpress of Kolain, and we know her position with respect to Mars at the instant of take-off. We can correct for Mars' advance along her—or his—orbit. We can figure the position of theEmpress of Kolainfrom her angular distance from Mars! That's the only thing we need know. We don't give a ten-dollar damn about her true position."
Channing began to write equations on the tablecloth. "You see, they aren't moving so fast in respect to us. The course is foreshortened as they are coming almost in line with Venus Equilateral, curving outward and away from the Sun. Her course, as we see it from the station here, will be a long radius-upward curve, slightly on the parabolic side. Like all long-range cruises theEmpress of Kolainwill hoist herself slightly above the plane of the ecliptic to avoid the swarm of meteors that follow about the Sun in the same plane as the planets, lifting the highest at the point of greatest velocity.
"I get it," said Franks. "We get the best beam controller we have to keep the planet on the cross hairs. We apply a spiral cam to advance the beam along the orbit. Right?"
"Right." Don sketched a conical section on the tablecloth and added dimensions. He checked his dimensions against the long string of equations, and nodded. "We'll drive this cockeyed-looking cam with an isochronic clock, and then squirt a beam out there. Thank the Lord for the way our beam transmitters work."
"You mean the effect of reflected waves?" asked Chuck.
"Sure," grinned Don. "There's plenty of radar operating at our transmitting frequencies or near by. So far, no one has ever tried to radar anything as small as a spacecraft at that distance, though getting a radar signal from a planet is duck soup. Yet," he reflected cheerfully, "there are a couple of things we have handy out here, and one of them is a plethora of power output. We can soup up one of our beam transmitters and use it with a tightened beam to get a radar fix off of theEmpress of Kolain."
"And then?" asked Franks.
"Then we will have left the small end, which I'll give to you, Walt, so that you can have part of the credit."
Walt shook his head. "The easy part," he said uncheerfully. "By which you mean the manner in which we contact them and make them listen to us?"
"That's her," said Don with a cheerful smile.
"Fine," said Thomas. "Now what do we do?"
"Clear up this mess so we can make the cam. This drawing will do, just grab the tablecloth."
Joe, the operator of Venus Equilateral's one and only establishment for the benefit of the stomach, came up as the three men began to move their glasses and dishes over to an empty table. "What makes with the tablecloth?" he asked. "Want a piece of carbon paper and another tablecloth?"
"No," said Don nonchalantly. "This single copy will do."
"We lose lots of tablecloths that way," said Joe. "It's tough, running a restaurant on Venus Equilateral. I tried using paper ones once, but that didn't work. I had 'em printed but when the solar system was on 'em, you fellows drew schematic diagrams for a new coupler circuit. I put all kinds of radio circuits on them, and the gang drew plans for antenna arrays. I gave up and put pads of paper on each table, and the boys used them to make folded paper airplanes and they shot them all over the place. Why don't you guys grow up?"
"Cheer up, Joe. But if this tablecloth won't run through the blueprint machine, we'll squawk!"
Joe looked downcast, and Franks hurried to explain: "It isn't that bad, Joe. We won't try it. We just want to have these figures so we won't have to run through the math again. We'll return the cloth."
"Yeah," said Joe at their retreating figures. "And for the rest of its usefulness it will be full of curves, drawings, and a complete set of astrogating equations." He shrugged his shoulders and went for a new tablecloth.
Don, Walt and Chuck took their improvised drawing to the machine shop, where they put it in the hands of the master mechanic.
"This thing has a top requirement," Don told him. "Make it as quick as you can."
Master Mechanic Warren took the cloth and said: "You forgot the note. You know, 'Work to dimensions shown, do not scale this drawing.' Lord, Don, this silly looking cam will take a man about six hours to do. It'll have to be right on the button all over, no tolerance. I'll have to cut it to the 'T' and then lap it smooth with polishing compound. Then what'll you test it on?"
"Sodium light interferometer. Can you do it in four hours?"
"If nothing goes wrong. Brass all right?"
"Anything you say. It'll only be used once. Anything of sufficient hardness for a single usage will do."
"I'll use brass then. Or free-cutting steel may be better. If you make it soft you have the chance of cutting too much off with your lapping compound. We'll take care of it, Don. The rest of this stuff isn't too hard. Your framework and so on can be whittled out and pasted together from standard girders, right?"
"Sure. Plaster them together any way you can. And we don't want them painted. As long as she works, phooey to the looks."
"Fine," said Warren. "I'll have the whole business installed in the Beam Control Room in nine hours. Complete and ready to work."
"That nine hours is a minimum?"
"Absolutely. After we cut and polish that screwball cam, we'll have to check it, and then you'll have to check it. Then the silly thing will have to be installed and its concentricity must be checked to the last wave length of cadmium light. That'll take us a couple of hours, I bet. The rest of the works will be ready, checked, and waiting for the ding-busted cam."
"Yeah," agreed Franks. "Then we'll have to get up there with our works and put the electricals on the mechanicals. My guess, Don, is a good, healthy twelve hours before we can begin to squirt our signal."
Twelve hours is not much in the life of a man; it is less in the life of a planet. The Terran Standard of Gravity is so small that it is expressed in feet per second. But when the two are coupled together as a measure of travel, and the standard Terran G is applied for twelve hours steady, it builds up to almost three hundred miles per second, and by the end of that twelve hours, six million miles have fled into the past.
Now take a look at Mars. It is a small, red mote in the sky, its diameter some four thousand miles. Sol is eight hundred thousand miles in diameter. Six million miles from Mars, then, can be crudely expressed by visualizing a point eight times the diameter of the Sun away from Mars, and you have the distance that theEmpress of Kolainhad come from Mars.
But the ship was heading in at an angle, and the six million miles did not subtend the above arc. From Venus Equilateral, the position of theEmpress of Kolainwas more like two diameters of the Sun away from Mars, slightly to the north, and on the side away from Sol.
It may sound like a problem for the distant future, this pointing a radio beam at a planet, but it is no different from Galileo's attempts to see Jupiter through his Optik Glass. Of course, it has had refinements that have enabled man to make several hundred hours of exposure of a star on a photographic plate. So if men can maintain a telescope on a star, night after night, to build up a faint image, they can also maintain a beamed transmission wave on a planet.
All you need is a place to stand; a firm, immobile platform. The three-mile-long, one-mile-diameter mass of Venus Equilateral offered such a platform. It rotated smoothly, and upon its "business" end a hardened and highly polished set of rails maintained projectors that were pointed at the planets. These were parabolic reflectors that focussed ultra-high-frequency waves into tight beams which were hurled at Mars, Terra, and Venus for communication.
And because the beams were acted upon by all of the trivia in the Solar System, highly trained technicians stood their tricks at the beam controls. In fifty million miles, even the bending of electromagnetic waves by the Sun's mass had to be considered. Sunspots made known their presence. And the vagaries of land transmission were present in a hundred ways due to the distance and the necessity of concentrating every milliwatt of available power on the target.
This problem of theEmpress of Kolainwas different. Spaceships were invisible, therefore the beam-control man must sight on Mars and the mechanical cam would keep the ship in sight of the beam.
The hours went past in a peculiar mixture of speed and slowness. On one hand the minutes sped by swiftly and fleetingly, each tick of the clock adding to the lost moments, never to be regained. Time, being precious, seemed to slip through their fingers like sifting sand.
On the other hand, the time that must be spent in preparation of the equipment went slow. Always it was in the future, that time when their experiment must either prove a success or a failure. Always there was another hour of preparatory work before the parabolic reflector was mounted; and then another hour before it swung freely and perfectly in its new mounting. Then the minutes were spent in anticipation of the instant that the power stage of transmitter was tested and the megawatts of ultra-high-frequency energy poured into the single rod that acted as a radiator.
It was a singularly disappointing sight. The rod glowed not, and the reflector was the same as it was before the rod drew power. But the meters read and the generators moaned, and the pyrometers in the insulators mounted as the small quantity of energy lost was converted into heat. So the rod drew power, and the parabolic reflector beamed that power into a tight beam and hurled it out on a die-true line.
Invisible power that could be used in communications.
Then the cam was installed. The time went by even slower then, because the cam must be lapped and polished to absolute perfection, not only of its own surface but to absolute concentricity to the shaft on which it turned.
But eventually the job was finished, and the men stood back, their eyes expectantly upon Don Channing and Walt Franks.
Don spoke to the man chosen to control the beam. "You can start any time now. Keep her knifed clean, if you can."
The man grinned at Channing. "If the devils that roam the void are with us we'll have no trouble. We should all pray for a phrase used by some characters in a magazine I read once: 'Clear ether!' We could use some right now."
He applied his eyes to the telescope. He fiddled with the verniers for a brief time, made a major adjustment on a larger handwheel, and then said, without removing his eye from the 'scope, "That's it, Dr. Channing."
Don answered: "O.K., Jim, but you can use the screen now. We aren't going to make you squint through that pipe for the next few hours straight."
"That's all right. I'll use the screen as soon as you can prove we're right. Ready?"
"Ready," said Channing.
Franks closed a tiny switch. Below, in the transmitter room, relays clicked and heavy-duty contacts closed with blue fire. Meters began to climb upward across their scales, and the generators moaned in a descending whine. A shielded monitor began to glow, indicating that full power was vomiting from the mouth of the reflector.
And out from the projector there went, like a spear-head, a wave-front of circularly polarized microwaves. Die-true they sped, crossing the void like a line of sight to an invisible spot above Mars and to the left. Out past the Sun, where they bent inward just enough to make Jim's job tough. Out across the open sky they sped at the velocity of light, and taking sixteen minutes to get there.
A half-hour passed. "Now," said Channing. "Are we?"
Ten minutes went by. The receiver was silent save for a constant crackle of cosmic static.
Fifteen minutes passed.
"Nuts," said Channing. "Could it be that we aren't quite hitting them?"
"Could be," admitted Franks. "Jim, waggle that beam a bit, and slowly. When we hit 'em, we'll know it because we'll hear 'em a half-hour later. Take it easy and slowly. We've used up thirteen of our fifty-odd hours. We can use another thirty or so just in being sure."
Jim began to make the beam roam around the invisible spot in the sky. He swept the beam in microscopic scans, up and down, and advancing the beam by one-half of its apparent width at the receiver for each sweep.
Two more hours went by. The receiver was still silent of reflected signals.
It was a terrific strain, this necessary wait of approximately a half-hour between each minor adjustment and the subsequent knowledge of failure. Jim gave up the 'scope because of eyestrain, and though Don and Walt had confidence that the beam-control man was competent to use the cross-ruled screen to keep Mars on the beam, Jim was none too sure of himself, and so he kept checking the screen against the 'scope.
At the end of the next hour of abject failure, Walt Franks began to scribble on a pad of paper. Don came over to peer over Franks' shoulder, and because he couldn't read Walt's mind, he was forced to ask what the engineer was calculating.
"I've been thinking," said Franks.
"Beginner's luck?" asked Don with a wry smile.
"I hope not. Look, Don, we're moving on the orbit of Venus, at Venus' orbital velocity. Oh, all right, say it scientifical: We are circling Sol at twenty-one point seven five miles per second. The reflected wave starts back right through the beam, remember?"
"I get it," shouted Channing in glee. "Thirty-two minutes' transmission time at twenty-one point seven five miles per second gives us—ah—"
Walt looked up from his slide rule. "Fifty-two thousand, two hundred and twenty-four miles," he said.
"Just what I was about to say," grinned Don.
"But why do you always get there second with your genius?" complained Walt with a pseudo-hurt whine. "So how to establish it?"
"Can't use space radar for range," grunted Channing. "That would louse up the receiver. We've got everything shut off tight, you know. How about some visual loran?"
"Yipe!" exploded Walt. "How?"
"I'd suggest an optical range finder excepting that the base-line of three miles—the length of Venus Equilateral—isn't long enough to triangulate for that fifty-two thousand—"
"Two hundred and twenty-four miles," finished Walt with a grin. "Proceed, genius, with caution."
"So we mount a couple of mirrors at either end of the station, and key a beam of light from the center, heading each way. When the pulses arrive at the space flitter at the same time, he's in position. We'll establish original range by radar, of course, but once the proper interval or range is established, the pilot can maintain his own position by watching the pulsed-arrival of the twin-flickers of light. Just like loran, excepting that we'll use light, and we can key it so it will run alternately, top and bottom. To maintain the proper angle, all the pilot will have to do is to keep the light alternating—fluently. Any overlapping will show him that he's drifted."
"Fine!" glowed Walt. "Now, how the devil long will it take?"
"Ask the boys, Walt," suggested Don.
Walt made a canvass of the machine shop gang, and came back, saying: "Couple of hours, God willing."
The mounting of the mirrors at either end of the station took little time. It was the amount of detailed work that took time; the devising of the interrupting mechanism; and the truing-up of the mirrors that took the time.
Then it became evident that there was more. There were several hundred doorways centered on the axis of Venus Equilateral that must be opened, the space cleared of packing cases, supplies, and in a few cases machinery had to be partially dismantled to clear the way. A good portion of Venus Equilateral's personnel of three thousand were taken off their jobs, haled out of bed for the emergency, or made to work through their play period, depending upon which shift they worked.
The machinery could be replaced, the central storage places could be refilled, and the many doors closed again. But the central room containing the air plant was no small matter. Channing took a sad look at the lush growth of Martian saw grass and sighed. It was growing nicely now, they had nurtured it into lusty growth from mere sprouts in trays and it was as valuable—precisely—as the lives of the three thousand-odd that lived, loved, and pursued happiness on Venus Equilateral. It was a youthful plant, a replacement brought in a tearing hurry from Mars to replace the former plant that was heaved out by the well-meaning Burbank.
Channing closed his eyes and shuddered in mock horror. "Chop out the center," he said.
The "center" meant the topmost fronds of the long blades; their roots were embedded in the trays that filled the cylindrical floor. Some of the blades would die—Martian saw grass is tender in spite of the wicked spines that line the edge—but this was an emergency with a capital E.
Cleaning the centermost channel out of the station was no small job. The men who put up Venus Equilateral had no idea that someone would be using the station for a sighting tube some day. The many additions to the station through the years made the layout as regular and as well-planned as the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.
So for hour upon hour, men swarmed in the central, weightless channel and wielded acetylene torches, cutting steel. Not in all cases, but there were many. In three miles of storage rooms, a lot of doors and bulkheads can be thrown up without crowding the size of the individual rooms.
Channing spoke into the microphone at the north end of Venus Equilateral, and said: "Walt? We've got a sight. Can you see?"
"Yop," said Walt. "And say, what happens to me after that bum guess?"
"That was quite a stretch, Walt. That 'hour, God willing,' worked itself into four hours, God help us."
"O.K., so I was optimistic. I thought that those doors were all on the center line."
"They are supposed to be, but they aren't huge and a little misalignment can do a lot of light-stopping. Can we juggle mirrors now?"
"Sure as shooting. Freddie in the flitter?"
"Yup. He thinks he's at the right distance now. But he's got a light outfit, and this radar can be calibrated to the foot. Is the mirror-dingbat running?"
"We're cooking with glass right now."
"Brother," groaned Channing, "if I had one of those death rays that the boys were crowing about back in the days before space-hopping became anything but a bit of fiction, I'd scorch your ears—or burn 'em off—or blow holes in you—or disintegrate you—depending on what stories you read. I haven't heard such a lousy pun in seventeen years—Hey, Freddie, you're a little close. Run out a couple of miles, huh?—and, Walt, I've heard some doozies."
There was a click in the phones and a cheerful voice chimed in with: "Good morning, fellows. What's with the Great Quest?"
Channing answered, "Hi, Babe, been snoozing?"
"Sure, as any sensible person would. Have you been up all the time?"
"Yeah. We're still up against the main trouble with telephones—the big trouble, same as back in 1887—our friends have no telephone! You'd be surprised how elusive a spaceship can be in the deep. Sort of a non-existent, microscopic speck, floating in absolutely nothing. We have a good idea of where they should be, and possibly why and what—but we're really playing with blindfolds, handcuffs, ear plugs, mufflers, nose clamps, and tongue-ties. I am reminded—Hey, Freddie, about three more hundred yards—of the two blind men."
"Never mind the blind men," came back the pilot. "How'm I doing?"
"Fine. Slide out another hundred yards and hold her there."
"Who—me? Listen, Dr. Channing, you're the bird on the tape line. You have no idea just how insignificant you look from fifty-odd thousand miles away. Put a red-hot on the 'finders and have 'im tell me where the ship sits."
"O.K., Freddie, you're on the beam and I'll put a guy on here to give you the dope. Right?"
"Right!"
"Right," echoed Arden breaking in on the phone. "And I'm going to bring you a slug of coffee and a roll. Or did you remember to eat recently?"
"We didn't," chimed in Walt.
"You get your own girl," snorted Channing. "And besides, you are needed up here. We've got work to do."
Once again the signal lashed out. The invisible waves drove out and began their swift rush across the void. Time, as it always did during the waiting periods, hung like a Sword of Damocles. The half-hour finally ticked away, and Freddie called in: "No dice. She's as silent as the grave."
Minutes added together into an hour. The concentric wave left the reflector and just dropped out of sight.
"Too bad you can't widen her out," suggested Don.
"I'd like to tighten it down," objected Walt. "I think we're losing power and we can't increase the power—but we could tighten the beam."
"Too bad you can't wave it back and forth like a fireman squirting water on a lawn," said Arden.
"Firemen don't water lawns—" began Walt Franks, but he was interrupted by a wild yell from Channing.
"Something hurt?" asked Arden.
"No. Walt, we can wave the beam."
"Until we find 'em? We've been trying that. No worky."
Freddie called in excitedly: "Something went by just now and I don't think it was Christmas!"
"We might have hit 'em a dozen times in the last ten minutes and we'll never know it," said Channing. "But the spaceliners can be caught. Let's shoot at them like popping ducks. Shotgun effect. Look, Walt, we can electronically dance the beam at a high rate of speed, spraying the neighborhood. Freddie can hear us return because we have to hit them all the time and the waver coming on the way back will pass through his position again and again. We'll set up director elements in the reflector, distorting the electrical surface of the parabolic reflector. That'll divert the beam. By making the phases swing right, we can scan the vicinity of theEmpress of Kolainlike a flying spot television camera."
Walt turned to one of the technicians and explained. The man nodded. He left for Franks' laboratory and Walt turned back to his friends.
"Here shoots another couple of hours. I, for one, am going to grab forty winks."
Jim, the beam-control man, sat down and lighted a cigarette. Freddie let his flitter coast free. And the generators that fed the powerful transmitter came whining to a stop. But there was no sleep for Don and Walt. They kept awake to supervise the work, and to help in hooking up the phase-splitting circuit that would throw out-of-phase radio frequency into the director-elements to swing the beam.
Then once again the circuits were set up. Freddie found the position again and began to hold it. The beam hurled out again, and as the phase-shift passed from element to element, the beam swept through an infinitesimal arc that covered thousands of miles of space by the time the beam reached the position occupied by theEmpress of Kolain.
Like a painter, the beam painted in a swipe a few hundred miles wide and swept back and forth, each sweep progressing ahead of the stripe before by less than its width. It reached the end of its arbitrary wall and swept back to the beginning again, covering space as before. Here was no slow, irregular swing of mechanical reflector, this was the electronically controlled wavering of a stable antenna.
And this time the half hour passed slowly but not uneventfully. Right on the tick of the instant, Freddie called back: "Got 'em!"
It was a weakling beam that came back in staccato surges. A fading, wavering, spotty signal that threatened to lie down on the job and sleep. It came and it went, often gone for seconds and never strong for so much as a minute. It vied, and almost lost completely, with the constant crackle of cosmic static. It fought with the energies of the Sun's corona and was more than once the underdog. Had this returning beam carried intelligence of any sort it would have been wasted. About all that could be carried on a beam as sorry as this was the knowledge that there was a transmitter—and that it was transmitting.
But its raucous note synchronized with the paint-brush wiping of the transmitter. There was no doubt.
Don Channing put an arm around Arden's waist and grinned at Walt Franks. "Go to work, genius. I've got theEmpress of Kolainon the pipe. You're the bright-eyed lad that is going to wake them up! We've shot almost twenty hours of our allotted fifty. Make with the megacycles, Walter. Arden and I will take in a steak, a moom pitcher, and maybe a bit of woo. Like?" he asked the girl.
"I like," she answered.
Walt Franks smiled and stretched lazily. He made no move to the transmitter. "Don't go away," he cautioned them. "Better call up Joe and order beer and sandwiches for the boys in the back room. On you!"
"Make with the signals first," said Channing. "And lay off the potables until we finish this silly job."
"You've got it. Is there a common, garden variety, transmitting key in the place?"
"Probably. We'll have to ask. Why?"
"Ask me."
Don removed his arm from Arden's waist. He picked up a spanner and advanced on Franks.
"No!" objected Arden. "Poison him—I can't stand the sight of blood. Or better, bamboo splinters under the fingernails. He knows something simple, the big bum!"
"Beer and sandwiches?" asked Walt.
"Beer and sandwiches," agreed Don. "Now, Tom Swift, what gives?"
"I want to key the beam. Y'see, Don, we're using the same frequency, by a half dozen megacycles, as their meteor spotter. I'm going to retune the beam to their frequency and key it. Realize what'll happen?"
"Sure," agreed Don, "but you're still missing the boat. You can't transmit keyed intelligence with an intermittent contact."
"In words, what do you mean, Don?" asked Arden.
"International Code is a series of dots and dashes, you may know. Our wabbling beam is whipping through the area in which theEmpress of Kolainis passing. Therefore the contact is intermittent. And how could you tell a dot from a dash?"
"Easy," bragged Walt Franks. "We're not limited to the speed of deviation, are we?"
"Yes—limited by the speed of the selsyn motors that transfer the phase-shifting circuits to the director radiators. Yeah, I get it, Edison, and we can wind them up to a happy six or eight thousand r. p. m. Six would get us a hundred cycles per second—a nice, low growl."
"And how will they receive that kind of signal on the meteor spotter?" asked Arden.
"The officer of the day will be treated to the first meteor on record that has intermittent duration—it is there only when it spells in International Code!"
Prying the toy transmitting key from young James Burke was a job only surpassed in difficulty by the task of opening the vault of the Interplanetary Bank after working hours. But Burke, Junior, was plied with soda pop, ice cream, and candy. He was threatened, cajoled, and finally bribed. And what Venus Equilateral paid for the toy finally would have made the toy manufacturer go out and look for another job. But Walt Franks carried the key to the scene of operations and set it on the bench to look at it critically.
"A puny gadget, at that," he said, clicking the key. "Might key a couple of hundred watts with it—but not too long. She'd go up like a skyrocket under our load!"
Walt opened up a cabinet and began to pull out parts. He piled several parts on a bread board, and in an hour had a very husky thyraton hooked into a circuit that was simplicity itself. He hooked the thyraton into the main power circuit and tapped the key gingerly. The transmitter followed the keyed thyraton and Don took a deep breath.
"Do you know code?" he asked.
"Used to. Forgot it when I came to Venus Equilateral. Used to hold a ham ticket on Terra. But there's no use hamming on the station here where you can wake somebody by yelling at the top of your voice. The thing to ask is, 'Does anyone know code on board theEmpress of Kolain?'"
They forgot their keying circuit and began to adjust the transmitter to the frequency used by the meteor spotter. It was a job. But it was done, all the way from the master oscillator stage through the several frequency doubler stages and to the big power-driver stage. The output stage came next, and then a full three hours of tinkering with files and hacksaws were required to adjust the length of the main radiator and the director elements so that their length became right for the changed frequency.
Finally Walt took the key and said: "Here goes!"
He began to rattle the key. In the power room the generators screamed and the lights throughout the station flickered just a bit at the sudden surges.
Don Channing said to Arden: "If someone of theEmpress of Kolaincan understand code—"
TheEmpress of Kolainwas zipping along in its silent passage through the void. It was an unseen, undetected, unaware bit of human manufacture marking man's will among the stars. In all the known universe it moved against the forces of celestial mechanics because some intelligent mote that infested the surface of a planet once had the longing to visit the stars. In all the Solar System, most of the cosmic stuff was larger than it—but it alone defied the natural laws of space.
Because it alone possessed the requiredoutsideforce spoken of in Newton's "Universal Laws."
And it was doing fine.
Dinner was being served in the dining room. A group of shapely girls added grace to the swimming pool on the promenade deck. The bar was filled with a merry crowd which in turn were partly filled with liquor. A man in uniform, the Second Officer, was throwing darts with a few passengers in the playroom, and there were four oldish ladies on sabbatical leave who were stricken withmal-de-void.
The passage up to now had been uneventful. A meteor or two had come to make the ship swing a bit—but the swerve was less than the pitch of an ocean vessel in a moderate sea and it did not continue as did an ocean ship. Most of the time theEmpress of Kolainseemed as steady as solid rock.
Only the First Officer, on the bridge, and the Chief Pilot, far below in the Control Room, knew just how erratic their course truly was. But they were not worried. They were not a shell, fired from a gun; they were a spaceship, capable of steering themselves into any port on Venus when they arrived and the minute wobbulations in their course could be corrected when the time came. For nothing had ever prevented a ship of space from seeing where it was going.
Yes, it was uneventful.
Then the meteor screen flashed into life. A circle of light appeared in the celestial globe and the ship's automatic pilot swerved ever so little. The dot of light was gone.
Throughout the ship, people laughed nervously. A waiter replaced a glass of water that had been set too close to the edge of the table and a manly-looking fellow dived into the swimming pool to haul a good-looking blonde to the edge again. She'd been in the middle of a swan dive when the swerve came and the ship had swerved without her. The resounding smack of feminine stomach against the water was of greater importance than the meteor, now so many hundred miles behind.
The flash of light returned and the ship swerved again. Upon the third swerve, the First Officer was watching the celestial globe with suspicion. He went white. It was conceivable that theEmpress of Kolainwas about to encounter a meteor shower.
And that was bad.
He marked the place and set his observation telescope in synchronism with the celestial globe. He searched the sky. There was nothing but the ultimate starry curtain in the background. He snapped a switch and the voice of the pilot came out of a speaker in the wall.
"You called, Mr. Hendall?"
"Tony, take the levers, will you please? Something is rotten in the State of Denmark."
"O.K., sir. I'm riding personal."
"Kick out the meteor-spotter coupling circuits and forget the alarm."
"Right, Mr. Hendall, but will you confirm that in writing?"
Hendall scribbled on the telautograph and then abandoned the small 'scope. The flashing in the celestial globe continued, but the ship no longer danced in its path. Hendall went up into the big dome.
The big twenty-inch Cassegrain showed nothing at all, and Hendall returned to the bridge scratching his head. Nothing on the spotting 'scope and nothing on the big instrument.
That intermittent spot was large enough to mean a huge meteor. But wait. At the speed of theEmpress, it should have retrogressed in the celestial globe unless it was so huge and so far away—but Sol didn't appear on the globe and it was big and far away, bigger by far. Nothing short of a planet at less-than-planetary distances would do this.
Not even a visible change in the position of the spot.
"Therefore," thought Hendall, "this is no astral body that makes this spot!"
Hendall went to a cabinet and withdrew a cable with a plug on either end. He plugged one end into the test plug on the meteor spotter and the opposite end into the speaker. A low humming emanated from the speaker in synchronism with the flashing of the celestial globe.
It hit a responsive chord.
Hendall went to the main communication microphone and spoke. His voice went all over theEmpress of Kolainfrom pilot room and cargo spaces to swimming pool and infirmary.
"Attention!" he said in a formal voice. "Attention to official orders!"
Dancers stopped in midstep. Swimmers paused and then made their way to the edges of the pool and sat with their feet dangling in the warm water. Diners sat with their forks poised foolishly.
"Official orders!" meant an emergency.
Hendall continued: "I believe that something never before tried is being attempted. I am forced against my better knowledge to believe that some agency is trying to make contact with us; a spaceship in flight! This is unknown in the annals of space flying and is, therefore, indicative of something important. It would not have been tried without preparations unless an emergency exists.
"However, the requirements of an officer of space do not include a knowledge of code because of the lack of communication with the planets while in space. Therefore, I request that any person with a working knowledge of International Morse will please present himself to the nearest officer."
Minutes passed. Minutes during which the flashing lights continued.
Then the door of the bridge opened and Third Officer Jones entered with a thirteen-year-old youngster at his heels. The boy's eyes went wide at the sight of the instruments on the bridge, and he looked around in amazed interest.
"This is Timmy Harris," said Jones. "He knows code!"
"Go to it, Mr. Harris," said Hendall.
The boy swelled visibly. You could almost hear him thinking: "He called me 'mister'!"
Then he went to the table by the speaker and reached for pencil and paper. "It's code all right," he said. Then Timmy winked at Jones, "He has a lousy fist!"
Timmy Harris began to write.
"—course and head for Terra direct"—the beam faded for seconds—"Venusian fever and you will be quarantined.
"Calling CQ, calling CQ, calling CQ. CallingEmpress of Kolain... empowered us to contact you and convey ... message—you are requested to correct your course and head ... a plague of Venusian fever and you—Johnson of Interplanet has empowered us ... the following message: 'You are requested to correct your ... head for Terra direct.' Calling CQ...."
"Does that hash make sense to you?" asked Jones of Hendall.
"Sure," smiled Hendall, "it is fairly plain. It tells us that Keg Johnson of Interplanet wants us to head for Terra direct because of a plague of Venusian fever that would cause us to stay in quarantine. That would ruin the Line Moss. Prepare to change course, Mr. Jones!"
"Who could it be?" asked Jones foolishly.
"There is only one outfit in the Solar System that could possibly think of a stunt like this. And that is Channing and Franks. This signal came from Venus Equilateral!"
"Wait a minute," said Timmy Harris. "Here's some more."
"'As soon as this signal—intelligible—at right angles to your course for ten minutes. That will take—out of—beam and reflected—will indicate to us—left the area and know of our attempt.'"
"They're using a beam of some sort that indicates to them that we are on the other end but we can't answer. Mr. Jones, and Pilot Canton, ninety degrees north for ten minutes! Call the navigation officer to correct our course. I'll make the announcement to the passengers. Mr. Harris, you are given the freedom of the bridge for the remainder of the trip."
Mr. Harris was overwhelmed. He'd learn plenty—and that would help him when he applied for training as a space officer; unless he decided to take a position with Venus Equilateral when he grew up.
The signal faded from the little cruiser and silence prevailed. Don spoke into the microphone and said: "Run her up a millisecond," to the beam controller. The beam wiped the space above the previous course for several minutes and Franks was sending furiously:
"You have answered our message. We'll be seeing you!"
Channing told the man in the cruiser to return. He kicked the main switch and the generators whined down the scale and coasted to a stop. Tube filaments darkened and meters returned to zero.
"O.K., Warren. Let the spinach lay. Get the next crew to clean up the mess and polish the set-up into something presentable. I'll bet a cooky that we'll be chasing spaceships all the way to Pluto after this. We'll work it into a fine thing and perfect our technique. Right now I owe the gang a dinner."
When necessity dictates a course of action and the course of action proves valuable, it is but a short step to the inclusion of the answer into the many facets of modern technical civilization. Thus it was that not many months after Venus Equilateral successfully established planet-to-ship communications with the "Empress of Kolain" that all course constants were delivered to the relay station and thereafter messages were transmitted as a part of the regular business of Interplanetary Communications.
This, of course, offered another problem. Ships in space were in the position of being able to catch messages but were not able to answer back. It would take, perhaps, another emergency to set up conditions which demanded the reverse of the problem of contacting a ship in space.
But there was a more immediate problem. Spacecraft were protected from meteors by means of radar that was coupled to the steering panels of the ships; when a meteor threatened, the ship merely turned aside by that fraction of a degree that gave it safety.
It took, however, but a few meteors, and the resulting few fractions of a degree to shunt the swiftly moving ship out of the coverage-area of the ship-seeking beams from Venus Equilateral. Then the power and ingenuity of Venus Equilateral was wasted on vacant space and the messages intended for the ships went undelivered.
Since the ship must avoid meteors, and the meteors could not be diverted from their courses, there was but one answer: Swerve the ship and let the messages go hang, for a message is of no use to a riddled spacecraft!
But, thought several people, if the meteor cannot be steered, perhaps it might be removed....
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 dropped 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 ex-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 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: