"Yeah," drawled Wes Farrell, "but what makes it vibrate?"
Don Channing looked down at the crystal. "Where did you get it?" he asked.
Walt Franks chuckled. "I bet you've been making synthetic elements again with the heterodyned duplicator."
Farrell nodded. "I've found a new series sort of like the iron-nickel-cobalt group."
Channing shook his head. There was a huge permanent magnet that poured a couple of million gauss across its gap, and in this magnetic field Farrell had the crystal supported. A bank of storage batteries drove several hundred amperes—by the meter—through the crystal from face to face on another axis, and down from above there poured an intense monochromatic light.
"Trouble is," complained Wes, "that there isn't a trace of a ripple in any of the three factors that work on the thing. Permanent magnet, battery current, and continuous gas-arc discharge. Yet—"
"It vibrates," nodded Channing. "Faintly, but definitely it is vibrating."
Walt Franks disappeared for a moment. He returned with a portable phonograph, which caused Don Channing to grin and ask, "Walt, are you going to make a recording of this conversation, or do you think it will dance to a Strauss waltz?"
"It's slightly bats, so I brought the overture toDas Fledermausfor it," snorted Franks. As he spoke, he removed the pick-up from the instrument and added a length of shielded wire. Then he set the stylus of the phonograph against the faintly vibrating crystal and turned up the gain.
At once a whining hum came from the loud speaker.
"Loud, isn't it?" he grinned. "Can you identify that any better?"
Wes Farrell threw up his hands. "I can state with positiveness that there isn't any varying field of anything that I know of that is at that frequency."
Channing just grinned. "Maybe it's just normal for that thing to vibrate."
"Like an aspen leaf?" asked Walt.
Channing nodded. "Or like my wife's jello."
Walt turned the dial of an audio generator until the note was beating at zero with the vibrating crystal. "What frequency does Arden's jello work at?" he asked. "I've got about four-fifty per second."
"Arden's jello isn't quite that nervous," said Don, puzzling.
"Taking my name in vain?" asked a cool and cheerful contralto. Don whirled and demanded, "How long have you been keyhole listening?"
Arden smiled. "When Walt Franks nearly runs me down without seeing me—and in his great clutching hands is a portable phonograph but no records—and in his eye there is that wild Tom Swift glint—I find my curiosity aroused to the point of visible eruption. Interesting, fellers?"
"Baffling," admitted Channing. "But what were you doing standing on odd-corners waiting for Walt to run you down for?"
"My feminine intuition told me that eventually one of you would do something that will wreck the station. When that happens, my sweet, I want to be among the focus of trouble so that I can say I told you so."
Walt grunted. "Sort of a nice epitaph," he said. "We'll have them words 'I tole ya so' engraved on the largest fragment of Venus Equilateral when we do."
Don grinned. "Walt, don't you like women?"
Franks swelled visibly and pompously. "Why, of course," he said with emphasis. "Some of my best friends are women!"
Arden stuck her tongue out at him. "I like you, too," she said. "But you wait—I'll fix you!"
"How?" asked Walt idly.
"Oh, go freeze," she told him.
"Freeze?" chuckled Walt. "Now, that's an idea."
"Idea?" asked Don, seeing the look on Walt's face. "What kind of idea?"
Walt thought seriously for a moment. "The drinks are on me," he said. "And I'll explain when we get there. Game? This is good." Insistent, Walt led them from Wes Farrell's laboratory near the South End skin of Venus Equilateral to Joe's, which was up nine levels and in the central portion of the station. "Y'know," he said, "women aren't so bad after all. But I've got this feminine intuition business all figured out. Since women are illogical in the first place, they are inclined to think illogical things and to say what they think. Then if it should happen to make sense, they apply it. I used to know an experimenter that tried everything he could think of on the theory that some day he'd hit upon something valuable. Well—this is it, good people."
Walt shoved the door open and Wes Farrell grinned as he always did at the sign that read:
JOE'SThe Best BarinTwenty-seven Million Miles(minimum)
Arden entered and found a place at the long bar. The three men lined up on either side of her and Joe automatically reached for the Scotch and glasses.
"Now," said Channing, "what is it?"
Walt lifted his glass. "I drink to the Gods of Coincidence," he chanted, "and the Laws of Improbability. 'Twas here that I learned that which makes me master of the situation now."
Arden clinked her glass against his. "Walt, I'll drink to the Gods of Propinquity. Just how many problems have you solved in your life by looking through the bottom of a glass—darkly?"
"Ah—many," he said, taking a sip of the drink.
He swallowed.
A strange look came over his face. He spluttered. He grew a bit ruddy of face, made a strangling noise, and then choked.
"Migawd, Joe—what have you mixed this with, shoe polish?"
"Just made it this afternoon," replied Joe.
"Then throw it back in the matter bank and do it again," said Walt.
Don took a very cautious sip and made a painfully wry face. "The SPCS—Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Scotch—should dip their tongue in this," he said.
Joe shrugged. "It's from your own pet brand," he told Channing.
Arden smelled gingerly. "Don," she asked him seriously, "have you been petting dragons?"
Wes, chemist like, dipped his forefinger in the drink, diluted it in a glass of water, and touched it to his tongue. "It'll never be popular," he said.
Joe turned back to his duplicator and shoved a recording into the slot. The machine whirred for a few seconds, and Joe opened the door and took out the new bottle, which he handed to Walt. Walt cut the seal and pulled the cork, and poured. He tasted gingerly and made the same wry face.
"What in the name of could have happened?" he asked.
"It's the same recording," asserted Joe.
"But what happened to it?"
"Well," admitted Joe, "it was dropped this morning."
"In what?" demanded Walt.
"Just on the floor."
Wes Farrell nodded. "Probably re-arranged some of the molecular patterns in the recording," he said.
Joe put both bottles in the duplicator and turned the switch. They disappeared in seconds, and then Joe took another recording and made a bottle of a different brand. Again Walt tasted gingerly, smiled hugely, and took a full swallow.
"Whew," he said. "That was almost enough to make a man give up liquor entirely."
"And now," said Don Channing, "let us in on your big secret—or was this just a ruse to get us in this gilded bistro?"
Walt nodded. He led them to the back of the bar and into the back room. "Refrigerator," he said.
Arden took his arm with affected sympathy. "I know it's big enough but—"
Walt swung the huge door open and stepped in.
"I didn't really mean—" continued Arden, but her voice died off, trailing away into silence as Walt, motioning them to come in, also put his finger on his lips.
"Are you going to beef?" demanded Channing.
"No, you big ham," snorted Walt. "Just listen!"
Wes blinked and slammed the door shut behind them.
And then in the deep silence caused when the heavy door shut off the incident sounds from Joe's restaurant and bar, there came a faint, high-pitched hum.
Don turned to Arden. "That it?" he asked. "You've got better pitch-sense than I have."
"Sounds like it," admitted Arden.
"Cold in here," said Wes. He swung open the door and they returned to the bar for their drink. "We can establish its identity easily enough," he told them. He finished the drink, and turned from the bar. "Walt, you bring the pick-up and amplifier; Don, you carry the audio generator, and I'll bring up the rear with the rest of the gadget."
They left, and Joe threw his hands out in a gesture of complete helplessness.
"Trouble?" asked Arden cheerfully.
"I didn't mind when they used the tablecloths to draw on," he said. "I didn't really object when they took the tablecloths and made Warren use 'em as engineering sketches to make things from. But now, dammit, it looks like they're going to move into my refrigerator and for God knows what! I give up!"
"Joe," said Arden sympathetically, "have one on me."
"Don't mind if I do," chuckled Joe laconically. "If I'm to be shoved out of mine own bailiwick, I might as well enjoy these last few days."
He was finishing the drink as the technical section of Venus Equilateral returned, laden with equipment.
Arden shrugged. "Here we go again," she said. "Once more I am a gadget widow. What do you recommend, Joe? Knitting—or shall I become a dipsomaniac?"
Joe grinned. "Why not present Don with a son and heir?"
Arden finished her glass in one draught, and a horrified expression came over her face. "One like Don is all I can stand," she said in a scared voice. Then she smiled. "It's the glimmering of an idea, though," she added with brightening face. "It stands a fifty-fifty chance that it might turn out to be a girl—which would scare Don to death, having to live with two like me."
"Twins," suggested Joe.
"You stay the hell out of this," said Arden good-naturedly.
Walt Franks re-appeared, headed out of the restaurant, and returned a few minutes later with another small case full of measuring equipment.
"And this," said Arden as Walt vanished into the refrigerator once again, "will be known as the first time Walt Franks ever spent so much time in here without a drink!"
"Time," said Joe, "will tell."
Half way from Lincoln Head to Canalopsis, Barney Carroll was examining a calendar. "Christmas," he said absently.
Christine Baler stretched slender arms. "Yeah," she drawled, "and on Mars."
Her brother Jim smiled. "Rather be elsewhere?"
"Uh-huh," she said.
"On Terra, where Christmas originated? Where Christmas trees adorn every home, and the street corners are loaded with Santa Clauses? Where—"
"Christmas is a time for joy," said Christine. "Also to the average party, Christmas means snow, wassail, and friends dropping in. Me, I'm acclimated—almost—to this chilly Martian climate. Cold weather has no charm for your little sister, James."
"Oh," said Barney.
"Oh," echoed Jim, winking at his side-kick.
"Don't you 'Oh' me," snorted Christine.
"Oh?" repeated Barney. "Okay, woman, we get it. Instead of the cold and the storm you'd prefer a nice warm climate like Venus?"
"It might be fun," she said evasively.
"Or even better," said Jim Baler to Barney Carroll, "we might visit Venus Equilateral."
Christine's evasive manner died. "Now," she said, "you've come up with a bright idea!"
Barney chuckled. "Jim," he said, "call Walt Franks and ask him if he has a girl for us?"
"He has quite a stock in his little black book," remarked Jim.
"We'll drop in quietly, surprise-like," announced Christine. "And if there's any little black book, I'll see that you two Martian wolves divide 'em evenly."
"Walt is going to hate us for this," chuckled Jim. "Accessories to the fact of his lost bachelorhood. Okay, Chris, pack and we'll—"
"Pack nothing," laughed Christine. "I've packed. For all three of us. All we need is our furs until we get to Canalopsis. Then," she added happily, "we can dress in light clothing. I'm beginning to hate cold weather."
"How about passage?" asked Barney. "Or did you—"
Christine nodded. "TheMartian Girlleaves Canalopsis in about three hours. We pause at Mojave, Terra, for six hours, and thence to Venus Equilateral on the special trip that takes Christmas stuff out there."
Jim Baler shrugged. "I think we've been jockeyed," he said. "Come on, Barney, needs must when a woman drives."
"The quotation pertains to the devil," objected Barney.
"No difference," said Jim, and then he ducked the pillow that Christine threw at him.
A half hour later they were heading for Canalopsis.
"Walt?" smiled Arden. "Oh, sure, Walt's fine."
"Then—?"
"Yeah," added Barney good naturedly, "do we find 'em in Joe's or elsewhere?"
"The Joe-Section of the engineering has been completed," said Arden with a grin. "They nearly drove Joe nuts for about a week."
"What were they doing?" asked Jim. "Building an electronically-operated Martini?"
"When I tell you, you won't believe me," said Arden. "But they've been living in Joe's refrigerator."
"Refrigerator?" gasped Christine.
"Just like a gang of unhung hams," said Arden. "But they're out now."
"Well! That's good."
Arden paused in front of three doors on the residence level near her apartment and Jim, Christine, and Barney each put their traveling bags inside. Then Arden led them high into the station where they came to a huge bulkhead in which was a heavy door.
Arden opened the door and an icy blast came out.
"Jeepers!" exploded Christine.
"Hey! Ice-men!" called Arden.
From the inside of the vast room came Don, Walt, and Wes. They were clad in heavy furs and thick gloves, Channing was carrying a small pair of cutters that looked a bit ridiculous in the great glove.
"Well, holy rockets!" exploded Channing, "what gives?"
"Merry pre-Christmas," said Jim. Don whipped off a glove and Jim wrung his hand unmercifully. Wes Farrell greeted Barney Carroll jovially, while Walt Franks stood foolishly and gaped at Christine Baler.
Christine looked the heavy clothing over and shook her head. "And I came here to be warm," she said. "Come out from behind that fur, Walt Franks. I know you!"
"What is going on?" asked Barney.
"It all started in Joe's refrigerator," said Wes. "We found that the cold had crystallized a bit of metal in the compressor. We discovered that it was radiating one of the super-frequencies of the crystal-alloy level. When warm it didn't. So we've set up this super-cooler to make checks on it. Looks big."
Channing waved toward the door. "We've got the ultimate in super-coolers in there," he said. "Remember the principle of the sun-power tube—that it will drain power out of anything that it is attuned to? Well, we're draining the latent heat-energy out of that room with a power-beam tube—actually we're transmitting it across space to Pluto."
"Pluto?"
"Uh-huh. In effect, it is like trying to warm Pluto from the energy contained in that room. Obviously we aren't going to melt much of the solid-frozen atmosphere of Pluto nor create a warm and habitable planet of it. We can run the temperature down to darned near Nothing Kelvin without doing much of anything to Pluto."
"We're below the black-body temperature of Mars right now," said Walt. "And the gadgetry is working so much better that we're going to run it down to as far as we can get it."
"What do you hope to find?" asked Barney.
"Why, it looks as though we can make a set of crystals that will permit instantaneous communication from one to the other."
"Sounds good."
"Looks good, so far," said Channing. "Want to see it?"
Christine looked at the thermometer set in the face of the door. She turned back to the others and shook her head vehemently.
"Not for all the ice in Siberia," she said fervently.
Walt brightened. "How about some ice in a glass," he said.
"For medicinal purposes only," agreed Barney. "It's been deadly cold on Mars—about a quart and a half of sheer and utter cold."
"Been cold in there, too," said Don. "Arden, you're out of luck—you've stayed out of the cold."
"You try to freeze me out of this session," said Arden, "and you'll find that I have the coldest shoulder in the Solar System."
As the party from Mars left the platform of the spacecraft that was poised on the Landing Stage of Venus Equilateral, another landing was made. This landing came from the same ship, but unlike the arrival of the Balers and Barney Carroll, the later landing was unseen, unknown, and unwanted.
Mark Kingman had been a stowaway.
Now, most stowaways are apprehended because success in such a venture is difficult. To properly stow away, it is calculated that more than the nominal cost of the trip must be spent in planning and preparation. Also, there is the most difficult of all problems—that of stepping blithely ashore under the watchful eye of purser or authority whose business it is to see that all the passengers who embarked ultimately disembark—no more and no less; plus or minus zero. (It is considered that an infant born aboard ship is a legal passenger and not a stowaway. This is a magnanimity on the part of the transportation companies who understand that they might have difficulty in persuading any court that the will exists to defraud the company of rightful revenues, etc.) (A death and burial at sea is also ignored; the transportation company has already collected for a full fare!)
But Mark Kingman had done it. He had come aboard in a large packing case, labelled:
CERTIFIED UNIQUES!(Identium Protected)Under NO CircumstanceswillDUPLICATORorMATTER TRANSMITTERBe Tolerated
With magnificent sophistry, Kingman was within the letter of the law that did not permit false representation of contained merchandise. For he, a human being, was a certified unique, he having never been under the beam of the integrator scanning beam of the matter duplicator or transmitter. Nor had any other living human, for that matter. The identium protection was insurance on all such cargoes; it prevented some overly—or underly bright clerk from slipping the package into a duplicator to make shipping easier. Identium exploded rather violently under the impact of the scanner beam, it will be recalled.
Along with Kingman was a small battery-powered duplicator, and a set of recordings. The duplicator produced fresh air as needed, water, food, and even books, games, and puzzles for solitary entertainment. Waste material went into the matter bank, proving the earlier statements that with a well-equipped duplicator and a set of recordings, any man can establish a completely closed system that will be valid for any length of time desired.
When the ship landed, Kingman tossed all the loose material into the duplicator and reduced it to nonhomogeneous matter in the matter bank. Then he turned the duplicator-beam against the side-wall of the huge box and watched the side-wall disappear into the machine.
He stepped out through the opening, which was calculated to miss the concealed plates of identium installed to prevent just this very thing. Kingman, of course, had planned it that way.
Once outside, Kingman set the duplicator on the deck between other cases and snapped the switch. The scanner beam produced books from Kingman's own library which he packed in the case. Then by reversing the direction of depth scan without changing the vertical or horizontal travel, Kingman effected a completed reversal of the restoration. The side of the packing case was re-established from the inside out, from the original recording which, of course, was made from the other side. It re-formed perfectly, leaving no seam.
Kingman went down an unused shaft to the bottom of the ship, where he drilled down with the duplicator through the bottom of the ship where it stood upon the Landing Stage. Down through the stage he went and into a between-deck volume that was filled with girders.
He re-set the duplicator and replaced landing stage and the ship's hull.
By the time that the party had adjourned to Joe's, Mark Kingman was high in the Relay Station, near the center line and a full mile and a half from the Landing Stage. He was not far from the vast room that once contained a lush growth of Martin Sawgrass, used before the advent of the duplicator, for the purification of the atmosphere in Venus Equilateral.
He was reasonably safe. He knew that the former vast storages of food and supply were no longer present, and that being the case, few people would be coming up to this out of the way place almost a third of a mile above the outer radius of the station where the personnel of Venus Equilateral lived and worked.
He started his duplicator and produced a newly charged battery first. He tossed the old one into the matter bank. He'd have preferred a solar energy tube, but he was not too certain of Sol's position from there and so he had to forego that.
Then he used the duplicator to produce a larger duplicator, and that duplicator to make a truly vast one. The smaller numbers he shoved into the larger one.
From the huge duplicator, Kingman made great energy-beam tubes and the equipment to run them. Taking his time, Kingman set them up and adjusted them carefully.
He pressed the starting button.
Then a complete connection was established between an area high in the station but a good many thousand feet away—and on the other side of the central axis—through the energy-beam tubes, and a very distant receptor tube on the planet Pluto.
"This," punned Kingman, "will freeze 'em out!"
His final act before relaxing completely was to have the huge duplicator build a small but comfortable house, complete with furniture and an efficient heating plant. Then he settled down to wait for developments.
"So what brings you out to Venus Equilateral?" asked Don.
"Christmas," said Barney. "We—Christine—thought that it might be nice to spend Christmas with old friends in a climate less violent than Mars."
"Well, we're all tickled pink," nodded Arden.
"Frankly," grinned Jim Baler, "my charming sister has set her sights on your bachelor playmate."
"I think it is mutual," said Arden. "After all, Walt has had a lot of business to tend to on Mars. He used to use the beams to conduct business—in fact he still does most of it by communications when it isn't Mars—but give him three ten-thousandths of an excuse and he's heading for Canalopsis."
"I noted with interest that Christine was quite willing to help him work."
"Fat lot of work they'll accomplish."
"Speaking of work, Wes, what goes on right now in this deal?"
"We've just set up a modulator," said Wes. "I'm modulating the current since the magnetic field is supplied by a permanent magnet and the monochromatic light comes from an ion arc. Using varying light seems to widen the response band with a loss in transmission intensity. This way, you see, all the energy going into the crystal is transmitted on a single band, which is of course a matter of concentrated transmission."
"That sounds sensible. Also, if this gets to sounding practical, it is quite simple to establish and maintain a high-charge permanent magnet field, and also a monochromatic light from a continuous gas-arc. Easier, I'd say, than making ammeters all read alike."
"Utopia," said Wes Farrell, "is where you can use any handy meter and find it within one tenth of one percent of any other—including the Interplanetary Standard."
Channing observed that Utopia was far from achieved. Then he said: "You've got the Thomas gents out in a ship with another crystal set-up?"
"Anopheles," said Farrell. "Will shortly head for Mars with the other half of the gear in another refrigerated compartment. If this proves practical, Pluto is going to become useful."
Arden nodded absently. "I've always claimed that there is a practical use for everything."
Channing opened his mouth to say something and had it neatly plugged by Arden's small hand. "No, you don't," she said. "We've all heard that one."
"Which one?" asked Farrell.
"The one about the navel being a fine place to hold the salt when you're eating celery in bed," said Arden. Channing removed Arden's hand from his mouth and placed it in hers. "You done it," he told her ungrammatically. "For which I'll not tell you what Walt and Christine are doing right now."
Arden's attempt to say, "Pooh. I know," was thoroughly stifled and it came out as a muffled mumble.
Channing turned to Wes and asked: "Have any good theories on this thing?"
Farrell nodded. "I noted that the energy entering the crystal was not dissipated as heat. Yet there was quite a bit of energy going in, and I wanted to know where it was going. Apparently the energy going in to the crystal will only enter under the influence of a magnetic field. Changing the field strength of the magnet changes the band, for the transmission to the similar crystal ceases until the other one has had its magnetic field reduced in synchronous amount. Also, no energy is taken by the crystal unless there is an attuned crystal. The power just generates heat, then, as should be normal.
"So," said Wes thoughtfully, "the propagation of this communicable medium is powered by the energy going into the crystal. Crystals tend to vibrate in sympathy with one another; hitting one with a light hammer will make the other one ring, and vice versa. I've tried it with three of them, and it makes a complete three-way hookup. As soon as Chuck and Freddie Thomas get out a good way, we'll be able to estimate the velocity of propagation, though I think it is the same as that other alloy-transmission band we've been using."
Channing grinned. "The speed of light, squared?"
Farrell winced.Thatargument was still going on, whether or not you could square a velocity. "We'll know," he said quietly.
The loudspeaker above Farrell's desk hissed slightly, and the voice of Freddie Thomas came in: "I'm about to trust my precious life once more to the tender care of the hare-brained piloting of my semi-idiot brother. Any last words you'd like to have uttered?"
Wes picked up a microphone and said: "Nothing that will bear transmission under the rules. If there's anything I want to tell you, I'll call you on this—and if this doesn't work, we'll try the standard. They're on your course?"
"On the button all the way—they tell me."
"Well, if you jiggle any, call us," said Farrell, "either on the standard space phone or this coupled-crystal set-up."
Channing grinned. "So it has a name?"
Freddie laughed. "We never did settle on a name for the driver-radiation communication system. So we're starting this one off right. It's the Coupled-Crystal Communicator. For short, 'Seesee', see?"
Channing returned the laugh. "Seeseesee, or Seesee, understand?"
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.
Walt grinned. "Have I been had?"
"I had Jim pack the all-white shotgun," she told him.
"Shucks, why not just have him threaten to sit on me?" asked Walt. He kissed her again.
"Now," she said after an appropriate and pleasant interval, "just what was my 'thought for the week'?"
"Kingman," he said, his forehead creasing in a frown.
"Kingman?"
"We've no corner on brains," said Walt. "Anybody tinkering with these energy tubes might easily devise the same thing. Kingman's immediate thought would be to freeze us out, I betcha."
Walt kissed her again and then let her go, "Let's do some juggling with figures," he said.
"What kind of?"
"The Laws of Probability aided by a bit of sheer guesswork and some shrewd evaluation of the barrister's mind."
Christine smiled. "You can speak plainer than that," she said.
"I know," he replied, reaching for his bag of gear, "but there's a lady present."
"You forget that the lady thought of it," Christine pointed out. "So let's go and find the—barrister."
"It ought to show, though," observed Walt. "And yet, my lady, we can check whether there has been cross-duggery at the skull-roads by making a brief observation along here somewhere."
"How?"
"Well, about fifty yards up this corridor there is a wall-thermostat."
"You think that if Kingman were trying to chill-off the place, he'd have bollixed the thermostats so they can't heat up the place and compensate?"
Walt nodded. "He'd do it, not knowing that we had all the near-by circuits shut off for our own experiment, no doubt."
"You don't suppose Kingman knew about this idea and decided to add to the general effect?" asked Christine.
Walt shook his head. "He'd assume that someone would be rambling up here off and on to look at the works. He'd automatically choose another place if he thought we had this one under observation."
Walt stopped at the thermostat and with a screwdriver he removed the face of the instrument. He reached down into his tool-pocket and took out a long, slender pair of tweezers. He probed in the depths of the thermostat and come out with a tiny square of paper.
He held it up for Christine to see.
"Stickum on one side held it until the contacts closed," he said. "Then it made a darned good insulator. Betcha this slip of paper came from Terran Electric!"
"Now what?" asked Christine.
"I'm going to call Don," said Walt. "Iffen and providen we can find a live jack." He took a handset from his kit of tools and plugged it into the jack below the thermostat. He jiggled a tiny switch and pressed a little red button, and after a full three minutes, he said "Damn," under his breath and dropped the handset back into his tool kit.
"Nobody's paying much attention to the telephone from this section of Venus Equilateral any more," he said. "There's a live one in the cold room, though. Let's take a look around first."
"Which way?"
Walt thought for a moment. "We set the cold room about one-third of the way from the North End because it was as far from the rest of the station's operating and living section as possible while commensurable with being reasonably close to the labs," he said. "We're not very far—perhaps a hundred yards from the axis. We're about a mile from the North End.
"Now, if I were Kingman, I'd set up shop in some place as far from the operating section as possible commensurable with an out of the way place—and definitely far from the laboratories. Then I'd select a place as far from me as I could get without too much danger of having the effect detected."
Christine nodded. "If Venus Equilateral were a cube, you'd take one corner and chill off the opposite corner."
"Venus Equilateral is a cylinder, and the skin is filled with people. However, you can set up an equation in differential calculus that will give you two spots as far from one another as possible with the least danger of detection from the ends or skin of a cylinder. The answer will give you two toroidal volumes located inside of the cylinder. You set your workshop in one and start the chill-off in the other—and right across the center from you."
"And?" prompted Christine with a smile.
"We used the same equation to locate the least dangerous place. Predicated on the theory that if the personnel need be protected from the danger area as much as the danger area need be concealed from people, we can assume the use of the same constants. Now, since by sheer coincidence Markus the Kingman selected a spot in the toroid that we also selected, it narrows our search considerably."
"In other words, we chase down the length of the station, cross the axis, and knock on Kingman's door."
"Right," said Walt.
And being firmly convinced that mixing pleasure with business often makes the business less objectionable, Walt kissed Christine once more before they started toward the place where they expected to find their troublemaker.
"About here," said Walt, looking up at a smooth bulkhead.
"How are we going to find him?" asked Christine. The corridor was long and die-straight, but both walls were sheer for thirty feet and unbroken.
"Look, I guess," said Walt, uncertainly. "I'm not too familiar with this section of the station. When I was first here—many years ago—I spent a lot of spare time roaming and exploring these seldom-used corridors. But my Boy Scout hatchet wouldn't cut trail-blazes on the steel walls."
He laughed a bit thoughtfully, and then he put his hands to his mouth, cupping them like a megaphone, and he yelled:
"Hey! Kingman! We're on to you!"
"But what good will that do?" asked Christine doubtfully.
"Might scare him into action," said Walt. "Easiest way to shoot pa'tridge is to flush it into the open. Otherwise you might walk over a nest and never see it. I—Holy Grease!"
A four foot section of the wall beside them flashed into nothingness with neither sound nor light nor motion. It just disappeared. And as they goggled at the vacant square, an ugly round circle glinted in the light and a sourly-familiar voice invited them in—or else!
"Well," said Walt Franks, exhaling deeply. "If it isn't Our Legal Lamp himself!"
Kingman nodded snappishly. "You were looking for me?"
"We were."
"It's too bad you found me," said Kingman.
"It was just a matter of time before you dropped all pretense of being thinly legal," said Walt scathingly. "Give you credit, Kingman, for conducting yourself as close to the line without stepping over for a long time. But now you can add breaking and entering to kidnaping to whatever other crimes you have committed."
Kingman smiled in a superior manner. "I might," he said suavely, "add murder. There would be no corpus delicti if both of you were fed into the duplicator."
"You can't record a human being," said Walt.
"Don't be stupid," said Kingman. "Who said anything about making a record?"
Walt admitted that this was so.
Then Kingman snapped the switch on the duplicator and the wall was re-established. Then he forced Christine to tie Walt, after which he tied Christine and then checked and added to Walt's bonds from a large roll of friction tape. He dropped them side by side in chair, and taped them thoroughly.
"You are a damned nuisance," he said. "Having to eliminate you tends to decrease my enjoyment at seeing the failure of Venus Equilateral. I'd have preferred to watch all of you suffer the hardest way. Killing you leaves fewer to gloat over, but it must be done. Once you found me, there is no other way."
"Walt," pleaded Christine, "won't the others find the same thing and follow us?"
Walt wanted to lie—wanted desperately to lie, if for no other reason than to spare Christine the mental anguish of expecting death. But Walt was not a good liar. He gave up and said: "I happen to be the guy who rigged the thermal-energy tube—and I'm the only guy who knows about the too-fast drop. All I hope for is that we'll be missed."
"We will," said Christine.
Kingman laughed nastily and began to fiddle with the scanning-rate controls on his duplicator.
Arden came running into her husband's office breathlessly. She was waving a sheet of paper and there was mingled anger and pleasure on her face as she shoved the paper under Don's eyes and waggled it. "Look!" she commanded.
"Stop fanning me with that," said Channing, "and let me see it if it's so all-fired important."
"I'll murder 'em in cold blood," swore Arden.
Channing pried his wife's fingers apart and took the paper. He read—and his eyes bulged with amused concern—