Part 11

"You've done a fine job," he told Hadley. "And now I declare an hour off for dinner. Dr. MacLain has got a working medical center with the aid of a few people who understand how such things work, and the percentage of broken bones, though terrific in number, is being taken care of. The passengers were pretty restive at first, but the coming of light seemed to work wonders. This first glimmer of power is another. About nine or ten who were able to do so were having severe cases of skysickness." He smiled ruefully. "I'm not too sure that I like no-weight myself."

"Have you been in the observation dome?" asked Don.

"Yes. It's pierced, you know."

"Did the meteor hit the telescope?"

"No, why?"

"Because I'm going to have to get a sight on Venus Equilateral before we can do anything. We'll have to beam them something, but I don't know what right now."

"Can we discuss that over a dinner?" asked the captain. "I'm starved, and I think that the rest of this gang is also."

"You're a man after my own heart," laughed Channing. "The bunch out at the station wouldn't believe me if I claimed to have done anything without drawing it up on a tablecloth."

"Now," said Channing over his coffee, "what have we in the way of electronic equipment?"

"One X-ray machine, a standard set of communicating equipment, one beam receiver with 'type machine for collecting stuff from your station, and so on."

"You wouldn't have a betatron in the place somewhere?" asked Don hopefully.

"Nope. Could we make one?"

"Sure. Have you got about a hundred pounds of Number 18 wire?"

"No."

"Then we can't."

"Couldn't you use a driver? Isn't that some kind of a beam?"

"Some kind," admitted Channing. "But it emits something that we've never been able to detect except in an atmosphere where it ionizes the air into a dull red glow."

"You should have been wrecked on the _Sorcerer's Apprentice_," laughed Hadley. "They're the guys who have all that kind of stuff."

"Have they?" asked Johannson.

"The last time I heard, they were using a large hunk of their upper hull for a Van Der Graf generator."

"That would do it," said Channing thoughtfully. "But I don't think I'd know how to modulate a Van Der Graf. A betatron would be the thing. You can modulate that, sort of, by keying the input. She'd give out with hundred-and-fifty-cycle stuff. How much of a trick is it to clear the observation dome from the top?"

"What do you intend to do?"

"Well, we've got a long, hollow tube in this ship. Knock out the faceted dome above, and we can rig us up a huge electron gun. We'll turn the ship to point at the station and beam 'em with a bouquet of electrons."

"How're you going to do that?"

"Not too tough, I don't think. Down here," and Channing began to trace on the tablecloth, "we'll put in a hot cathode. About this level we'll hang the first anode, and at this level we'll put the second anode. Here'll be an acceleration electrode, and up near the top we'll put a series of focussing anodes. We'll tap in to the driver-tube supply and take off voltage to suit us. Might use a tube at that, but the conversion to make an honest electron gun out of it would disrupt our power, and then it would be impossible to re-make a driver out of it without recourse to a machine shop."

"How are you going to make electrodes?"

"We'll use the annular gratings that run around the central well at each level," said Channing. "We'll have a crew of men cut 'em free and insulate the resulting rings with something. Got anything?"

"There is a shipment of methyl-methacrylate rods for the Venus Power Company in hold 17," said the cargo master.

"Fine," said Channing. "What size?"

"Three inches by six feet."

"It'll be tricky work, and you'll have to wait until your cut edge has cooled before you hook on the rods," mused Don. "But that's the ticket."

"Which floors do you want?"

"Have you got a scale drawing of the _Ariadne_?"

"Sure."

"Then this is where my tablecloth artistry falls flat. The focussing of an electron beam depends upon the electrode spacing and the voltage. Since our voltage is fixed if we take it from the drivers' electrodes, we'll have to do some mighty fine figuring. I'll need that scale drawing."

Channing's tablecloth engineering was not completely wasted. By the time the scale drawing was placed before him, Channing had half of the table filled with equations. He studied the drawing, and selected the levels which were to serve as electrodes. He handed the drawings to Hadley, and the power engineer began to issue instructions to his gang.

Then the central well began to swarm with space-suited men who bore cutting torches. Hot sparks danced from the cut girders that held the floorings, and at the same time, a crew of men were running cables from the various levels to the instrumented room. More hours passed while the circular sections were insulated with the plastic rods.

The big dome above was cut in sections and removed, and then the sky could be seen all the way from the bottom of the ship where the pilot's greenhouse should have been.

Channing looked it over and then remarked: "All we need now is an electron collector."

"I thought you wanted to shoot 'em off," objected Hadley.

"I do. But we've got to have a source of supply. You can't toss baseballs off of the Transplanet Building in Northern Landing all afternoon, you know, without having a few brought to you now and then. Where do you think they come from?"

"Hadn't thought of it in that way. What'd happen?"

"We'd get along for the first umpty-gillion electrons, and then all the soup we could pack on would be equalized by the positive charge on the ship and we couldn't shoot out any more until we got bombarded by the sun--and that bombardment is nothing to write home about as regards quantity. We're presenting too small a target. What we need is a selective solar intake plate of goodly proportions."

"We could use a mental telepathy expert, too. Or one of those new beam tubes that Baler and Carroll dug up out of the Martian desert. I've heard that those things will actually suck power out of any source, and bend beams so as to enter the intake vent, or end."

"We haven't one of those, either. Fact of the matter is," grinned Channing, ruefully, "we haven't much of anything but our wits."

"Unarmed, practically," laughed Hadley.

"Half armed, at least. Ah, for something to soak up electrons. I'm now wondering if this electron gun is such a good idea."

"Might squirt some protons out the other direction," offered Hadley.

"That would leave us without either," said Don. "We'd be like the man who tossed baseballs off of one side and himself off the other--Hey! Of course, we have some to spare. We can cram electrons out of the business end, thus stripping the planetary rings from the atoms in our cathode. From the far side we'll shoot the canal rays, which in effect will be squirting protons, or the nuclei. Since the planetaries have left for the front, it wouldn't be hard to take the protons away, leaving nothing. At our present voltages, we might be able to do it." Channing began to figure again, and he came up with another set of anodes to be placed beyond the cathode. "We'll ventilate the cathode and hang these negative electrodes on the far side. They will attract the protons, impelled also by the positive charge on the front end. We'll maintain a balance that way, effectively throwing away the whole atomic structure of the cathode. The latter will fade, just as the cathodes do in the driving tubes, only we'll be using electronic power instead of sub-electronic. Y'know, Hadley, some day someone is going to find a way to detect the--we'll call it radiation for want of anything better--of the driver. And then there will be opened an entirely new field of energy. I don't think that anybody has done more about the so-called sub-electronic field than to make a nice, efficient driving device out of it."

"Well, let's get our canal-ray electrodes in place. We've got about two hours before they realize that we aren't going to come in at Mojave. Then another two hours of wild messages between Venus Equilateral and Mojave. Then we can expect someone to be on the lookout. I hope to be there when they begin to look for us. At our present velocity, we'll be flirting with the Asteroid Belt in less than nothing flat. That isn't too bad--normally--but we're running without any meteor detector and autopilot coupler. We couldn't duck anything from a robin's egg on up."

"We'll get your anodes set," said Hadley.

* * * * *

Walt Franks grinned at Arden Channing. "That'll burn him," he assured her.

"It's been on the way for about twenty minutes," laughed Arden. "I timed it to arrive at Terra at the same time the _Ariadne_ does. They'll send out a special messenger with it, just as Don is getting aboard his little scooter. It'll be the last word, for we're not following him from Terra to here."

"You know what you've started?" asked Franks.

"Nothing more than a little feud between husband and self."

"That's just the start. Before he gets done, Don will have every ship capable of answering back. I've found that you can catch him off base just once. He's a genius--one of those men who never make the same mistake twice. He'll never again be in a position to be on the listening end only."

"Don's answer should be on the way back by now," said Arden. "Could be you're right. Something should be done."

"Sure I'm right. Look at all the time that's wasted in waiting for a landing to answer 'grams. In this day and age, time is money, squared. The latter is to differentiate between this time and the first glimmering of speedy living."

"Was there a first glimmering?" asked Arden sagely. "I've often thought that the speed-up was a stable acceleration from the dawn of time to the present."

"All right, go technical on me," laughed Walt. "Things do move. That is, all except the message from your loving husband."

"You don't suppose he's squelched?"

"I doubt it. Squelching Donald Channing is a job for a superbeing. And I'm not too sure that a superbeing could squelch Don and make him stay squelched. Better check on Mojave."

"Gosh, if Don missed the _Ariadne_ and I've been shooting him all kinds of screwy 'types every hour on the hour; Walt, that'll keep him quiet for a long, long time."

"He'd have let you know."

"That wouldn't have been so bad. But if the big bum missed and was ashamed of it--that'll be the payoff. Whoa, there goes the 'type!"

Arden drew the tape from the machine:

MESSAGE BEING HELD FOR ARRIVAL OF ARIADNE.

Walt looked at his watch and checked the course constants of the _Ariadne_. He called the beam-control dome and asked for the man on the ship's beam.

"Benny," he said, "has the _Ariadne_ arrived yet?"

"Sure," answered Benny. "According to the mechanical mind here, they've been on Mojave for twenty minutes."

"Thanks." To Arden he said: "Something's strictly fishy."

Arden sat at the machine and pounded the keys:

ARIADNE DUE TO ARRIVE AT 19:06:41. IT IS NOW 19:27:00. BEAM CONTROL SAYS TRANSMISSIONS ENDED BECAUSE OF COINCIDENCE BETWEEN TERRA BEAM AND STATION-TO-SHIP BEAM. PLEASE CHECK.

Arden fretted and Walt stamped up and down the room during the long minutes necessary for the message to reach Terra and the answer to return. It came right on the tick of the clock:

HAVE CHECKED COURSE CONSTANTS. SHIP OVERDUE NOW FIFTY MINUTES. OBVIOUSLY SOMETHING WRONG. CAN YOU HELP?

Walt smiled in a grim fashion. "Help!" he said. "We go on and on for years and years with no trouble--and now we've lost the third ship in a row."

"They claim that those things always run in threes," said Arden. "What are we going to do?"

"I don't know. We'll have to do something. Funny, but the one reason we must do something is the same reason why something can be done."

"I don't get that."

"With Channing on the _Ariadne_, something can be done. I don't know what, but I'll bet you a new hat that Don will make it possible for us to detect the ship. There is not a doubt in my mind that if the ship is still space-worthy, we can narrow the possibilities down to a thin cone of space."

"How?"

"Well," said Franks taking the fountain pen out of the holder on the desk and beginning to sketch on the blotter, "the course of the _Ariadne_ is not a very crooked one, as courses go. It's a very shallow skew curve. Admitting the worst, collision, we can assume only one thing. If the meteor were small enough to leave the ship in a floating but undirigible condition, it would also be small enough to do nothing to the general direction of the ship. Anything else would make it useless to hunt, follow?"

"Yes, go on."

"Therefore we may assume that the present position of the ship is within the volume of a cone made by the tangents of the outermost elements of the space curve that is the ship's course. We can take an eight-thousand-mile cylinder out of one place--for the origin of their trouble is between Mars and Terra and the 'shadow' of Terra in the cone will not contain the _Ariadne_."

"Might have passed close enough to Terra to throw her right into the 'shadow' of Terra by attraction," objected Arden.

"Yeah, you're right. O.K., so we can't take out that cylinder of space. And we add a sort of sidewise cone on to our original cone, a volume through which the ship might have passed after flying close enough to Terra to be deflected. I'll have the slipstick experts give a guess as to the probability of the _Ariadne's_ course, and at the same time we'll suspend all incoming operations. I'm going to set up every kind of detector I can think of, and I don't want anything upsetting them."

"What kind of stuff do you expect?" asked Arden.

"I dunno. They might have a betatron aboard. In that case we'll eventually get a blast of electrons that'll knock our front teeth out. Don may succeed in tinkering up some sort of electrostatic field. We can check the solar electrostatic field to about seven decimal places right here, and any deviation in the field to the tune of a couple of million electron volts at a distance of a hundred million miles will cause a distortion in the field that we can measure. We'll ply oscillating beams through the area of expectation and hope for an answering reflection, though I do not bank on that. We'll have men on the lookout for everything from smoke signals to helio. Don't worry too much, Arden, your husband is capable of doing something big enough to be heard. He's just the guy to do it."

"I know," said Arden soberly. "But I can't help worrying."

"Me, too. Well, I'm off to set up detectors. We'll collect something."

* * * * *

"Have we got anything like a piece of gold leaf?" asked Channing.

"I think so, why?"

"I want to make an electroscope. That's about the only way I'll know whether we are getting out with this cockeyed electron gun."

"How so?" asked Hadley.

"We can tell from the meter that reads the beam current whether anything is going up the pipe," explained Channing. "But if we just build us a nice heavy duty charge--as shown by the electroscope--we'll be sure that the electrons are not going far. This is one case where no sign is good news."

"I'll have one of the boys set up an electroscope in the instrument room."

"Good. And now have the bird on the telescope find Venus Equilateral. Have him set the 'scope angles to the figures here and then have him contact Darlange to have the ship slued around so that Venus Equilateral is on the cross hairs. That'll put us on a line with the station. A bundle of electrons of this magnitude will make a reading on any detectors that Walt can set up."

Hadley called the observation dome. "Tim," he said, giving a string of figures, "set your 'scope for these and then get Darlange to slue the crate around so that your cross hairs are on Venus Equilateral."

"O.K.," answered Tim. "That's going to be a job. This business of looking through a 'scope while dressed in a spacesuit is no fun. Here goes."

He called Darlange, and the communicator system permitted the men in the instrument room to hear his voice. "Dar," he said, "loop us around about forty-one degrees from driver 3."

Darlange said: "Right!" and busied himself at his buttons.

"Three degrees on driver 4."

"Right!"

"Too far, back her up a degree on 4."

Darlange laughed. "What do you think these things are, blocks and tackles? You mean: 'Compensate a degree on 2.'"

"You're the pilot. That's the ticket--and I don't care if you lift it on one hand. Can you nudge her just a red hair on 3?"

"Best I can do is a hair and a half," said Darlange. He gave driver 3 just a tiny, instantaneous surge.

"Then take it up two and back one and a half," laughed Tim. "Whoa, Nellie, you're on the beam."

"Fine."

"Okay, Dar, but you'll have to play monkey on a stick. I'll prime you for any moving so that you can correct immediately."

"Right. Don, we're on the constants you gave us. What now?"

"At this point I think a short prayer would be of assistance," said Channing soberly. "We're shooting our whole wad right now."

"I hope we make our point."

"Well, it's all or nothing," agreed Don as he grasped the switch.

He closed the switch, and the power demand meters jumped up across their scales. The gold leaf electroscope jumped once; the ultra-thin leaves jerked apart by an inch, and then oscillated stiffly until they came to a balance. Channing, who had been looking at them, breathed deeply and smiled.

"We're getting out," he said.

"Can you key this?" asked Hadley.

"No need," said Channing. "They know we're in the grease. We know that if they can collect us, they'll be on their way. I'm going to send out for a half-hour, and then resort to a five-minute transmission every fifteen minutes. They'll get a ship after us with just about everything we're liable to need, and they can use the five-minute transmissions for direction finding. The initial shot will serve to give them an idea as to our direction. All we can do now is to wait."

"And hope," added Captain Johannson.

Electrically, Venus Equilateral was more silent than it had ever been. Not an electrical appliance was running on the whole station. People were cautioned about walking on deep-pile rugs, or combing their hair with plastic combs, or doing anything that would set up any kind of electronic charge. Only the highly filtered generators in the power rooms were running and these had been shielded and filtered long years before; nothing would emerge from them to interrupt the ether. All incoming signals were stopped.

And the men who listened with straining ears claimed that the sky was absolutely clear save for a faint crackle of cosmic static which they knew came from the corona of the Sun.

One group of men sat about a static-field indicator and cursed the minute wiggling of the meter, caused by the ever moving celestial bodies and their electronic discharges. A sunspot emission passed through the station once, and though it was but a brief passage, it sent the electrostatic field crazy and made the men jump.

The men who were straining their ears to hear became nervous and were jumping at every loud crackle.

And though the man at the telescope knew that his probability of picking up a sight of the _Ariadne_ was as slender as a spider's web, he continued to search the starry heavens. He swept the narrow cone of the heavens wherein the _Ariadne_ was lost according to the mathematical experts, and he looked at every bit of brightness in the field of his telescope as though it might be the missing ship.

The beam-scanners watched their return-plates closely. It was difficult because the receiver gains were set to maximum and every tick of static caused brief flashes of light upon their plates. They would jump at such a flash and hope for it to reappear on the next swipe, for a continuous spot of light would indicate the ship they sought. Then, as the spot did not reappear, they would go on with their beams to cover another infinitesimal portion of the sky. Moving forward across the cone of expectancy bit by bit, they crossed and recrossed until they were growing restive.

Surely the ship must be there!

At the south end landing stage, a group of men were busy stocking a ship. Supplies and necessities were carried aboard, while another group of men tinkered with the electrical equipment. They cleared a big space in the observation dome, and began to install a replica of the equipment used on the station for detection. No matter what kind of output Channing sent back, they would be able to follow it to the bitter end.

They made their installations in duplicate, with one piece of each equipment on opposite sides of the blunt dome. Balancing the inputs of each kind by turning the entire ship would give them an indication of direction.

Franks did not hope that the entire installation could be completed before the signal came, but he was trying to outguess himself by putting some of everything aboard. When and if it came, he would be either completely ready with everything or he at least would have a good start on any one of the number of detectors. If need be, the detecting equipment in the station itself could be removed and used to complete the mobile installation.

Everything was in a complete state of nervous expectancy. Watchers watched, meter readers squinted for the barest wiggle, audio observers listened, trying to filter any kind of man-made note out of the irregular crackle that came in.

And the station announcing equipment was dead quiet, to be used only in case of emergency or to announce the first glimmer of radiation, whether it be material, electrical, kinetic, potential, or wave front.

Long they listened--and then it came.

The station announcing equipment broke forth in a multitude of voices.

"Sound input on radio!"

"Visual indication on scanner plates!"

"Distortion on electrostatic field indicator!"

"Super-electroscopes indicate negative charge!"

"Nothing on the telescope!"

There were mingled cheers and laughter as the speaker system broke away from babel, and each group spoke its piece with no interference. Walt Franks left the ship at the south end and raced to the beam control dome, just as fast as the runway car would take him. He ran into the dome in spacesuit and flipped the helmet back over his shoulder, "What kind of indication?" he yelled.

Men crowded around him, offering him papers and showing figures.

"Gosh," he said, "Don can't have everything going up there."

"He's hit just about everything but the guy squinting through the 'scope."

"What's he doing?" asked Franks of nobody in particular.

Charles Thomas, who had been busy with the electrostatic field indicator said: "I think maybe he's using some sort of electron gun--like the one you tried first off on the meteor destroyer job, remember?"

"Yeah, but that one wouldn't work--unless Don has succeeded in doing something we couldn't do. Look, Chuck, we haven't had time to set up a complete field indicator on the ship--grab yours and give the boys a lift installing it, hey?"

"Sure thing," said Thomas.

"And look, fellows, any indication of direction, velocity, or distance?"

"Look for yourself," said the man on the beam scanner. "The whole plate is shining. We can't get a fix on them this way--they're radiating themselves and that means our scanner-system finder is worthless."

"We can, but it's rough," offered one of the radio men. "It came from an area out beyond Terra--and as for our readings it might have covered a quarter of the sky."

"The field indicator is a short-base finder," explained Thomas. "And no less rough than the radio boys. I'd say it was out beyond Terra by fifty million miles at least."