Part 20
"Leave him alone," said Arden sagely. "He's good as he is. To make him similar to you would be to spoil a good man. He'd then be neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. He doesn't think as you do, but instead proceeds in a straight line from remote possibility to foregone conclusion. Anything that gets needed en route is used, or gadgeteered, and forgotten. That's where you come in, fellows. Inspect his by-products. They may be darned useful."
"O.K. Anybody care for a drink?"
"Yup. All of us," said Arden.
"Don, how did you rate such a good-looking wife?"
"I hired her," grinned Channing. "She used to make all of my stenographic mistakes, remember?"
"And gave up numerous small errors for one large one? Uh-huh, I recall. Some luck."
"It was my charm."
"Baloney. Arden, tell the truth. Didn't he threaten you with something terrible if you didn't marry him?"
"You tell him," grinned Channing. "I've got work to do."
* * * * *
Channing left the establishment known as Joe's; advertised as the "Best bar in twenty-seven million miles, minimum," and made his way to his office, slowly. He didn't reach it. Not right away. He was intercepted by Chuck Thomas, who invited him to view a small experiment. Channing smiled and said that he'd prefer to see an experiment of any kind to going to his office, and followed Chuck.
"You recall the gadget we used to get perfect tuning with the alloy-selectivity transmitter?"
"You mean that variable alloy disk all bottled up and rotated with a selsyn?" asked Don, wondering what came next. "Naturally I remember it. Why?"
"Well, we've found that certain sub-microscopic effects occur with inert objects. What I mean is this: Given a chunk of cold steel of goodly mass and tune your alloy disk to pure steel, and you can get a few micro-microamperes output if the tube is pointed at the object."
"Sounds interesting. How much amplification do you need to get this reading and how do you make it tick?"
"We run the amplifier up to the limit and then sweep the tube across the object sought, and the output meter leaps skyward by just enough to make us certain of our results. Watch!"
Chuck set the tube in operation and checked it briefly. Then he took Don's hand and put it on the handle that swung the tube on its gimbals. "Sort of paint the wall with it," he said. "You'll see the deflection as you pass the slab of tool steel that's standing there."
Channing did, and watched the minute flicker of the ultra-sensitive meter. "Wonderful," he grinned, as the door opened and Walt Franks entered.
"Hi, Don. Is it true that you bombarded her with flowers?"
"Nope. She's just building up some other woman's chances. Have you seen this effect?"
"Yeah--it's wonderful, isn't it?"
"That's what I like about this place," said Chuck with a huge smile. "That's approximately seven micro-microamperes output after amplification on the order of two hundred million times. We're either working on something so small we can't see it, or something so big we can't count it. It's either fifteen decimal places to the left or to the right. Every night when I go home I say a little prayer. I say: 'Dear God, please let me find something today that is based upon unity, or at least no more than two decimal places,' but it is no good. If He hears me at all He's too busy to bother with things that the human race classifies as 'One.'"
"How do you classify resistance, current, and voltage?" asked Channing, manipulating the tube on its gimbals and watching the effect.
"One million volts across ten megohms equals one hundred thousand microamperes. That's according to Ohm's Law."
"He's got the zero-madness, too," chuckled Walt. "It obtains from thinking in astronomical distances, with interplanetary coverages in watts, and celestial input, and stuff like that. Don, this thing may be handy some day. I'd like to develop it."
"I suggest that couple of stages of tube-amplification might help. Amplify it before transduction into electronic propagation."
"We can get four or five stages of sub-electronic amplification, I think. It'll take some working."
"O.K., Chuck. Cook ahead. We do not know whither we are heading, but it looks darned interesting."
"Yeah," added Walt, "it's a darned rare scientific fact that can't be used for something, somewhere. Well, Don, now what?"
"I guess we now progress to the office and run through a few reams of paper work. Then we may relax."
"O.K. Sounds good to me. Let's go."
* * * * *
Hellion Murdoch pointed to the luminous speck in the celestial globe. His finger stabbed at the marker button, and a series of faint concentric spheres marked the distance from the center of the globe to the object, which Murdoch read and mentioned: "Twelve thousand miles."
"Asteroid?" asked Kingman.
"What else?" asked Murdoch. "We're lying next to the Asteroid Belt."
"What are you going to do?"
"Burn it," said Murdoch. His fingers danced upon the keyboard, and high above him, in the dome of the _Black Widow_, a power intake tube swiveled and pointed at Sol. Coupled to the output of the power intake tube, a power output tube turned to point at the asteroid. And Murdoch's poised finger came down on the last switch, closing the final circuit.
Meters leaped up across their scales as the intangible beam of solar energy came silently in and went as silently out. It passed across the intervening miles with the velocity of light squared, and hit the asteroid. A second later the asteroid glowed and melted under the terrific bombardment of solar energy directed in a tight beam.
"It's O.K.," said Hellion. "But have the gang build us three larger tubes to be mounted turretwise. Then we can cope with society."
"What do you hope to gain by that? Surely piracy and grand larceny are not profitable in the light of what we have and know."
"I intend to institute a reign of terror."
"You mean to go through with your plan?"
"I am a man of my word. I shall levy a tax against any and every ship leaving any spaceport. We shall demand one dollar solarian for every gross ton that lifts from any planet and reaches the planetary limit."
"How do you establish that limit?" asked Kingman interestedly.
"Ironically, we'll use the Channing Layer," said Murdoch with dark humor. "Since the Channing Layer describes the boundary below which our solar beam will not work. Our reign of terror will be identified with Channing because of that; it will take some of the praise out of people's minds when they think of Channing and Venus Equilateral."
"That's pretty deep psychology," said Kingman.
"You should recognize it," smiled Murdoch. "That's the kind of stuff you legal lights pull. Mention the accused in the same sentence with one of the honored people; mention the defendant in the same breath with one of the hated people--it's the same stunt. Build them up or tear them down by reference."
"You're pretty shrewd."
"I am," agreed Murdoch placidly.
"Mind telling me how you found yourself in the fix you're in?"
"Not at all. I've been interested for years in neurosurgery. My researches passed beyond the realm of rabbits and monkeys, and I found it necessary to investigate the more delicate, more organized, the higher-strung. That means human beings--though some of them are less sensitive than a rabbit and less delicate than a monkey." Murdoch's eyes took on a cynical expression at this. Then it passed and he continued: "I became famous, as you know. Or do you?"
Kingman shook his head.
"I suppose not. I became famous in my own circle. Lesser neuro-surgeons sent their complex cases to me; unless you were complex, you would never hear of Allison Murdoch. Well, anyway, some of them offered exciting opportunities. I--frankly, experimented. Some of them died. It was quite a bit of cut and try because not too much has been written on the finer points of the nervous system. But there were too few people who were complex enough to require my services, and I turned to clinical work, and experimented freely."
"And there you made your mistake?"
"Do you know how?"
"No. I imagine that with many patients you exceeded your rights once too often."
"Wrong. It is a funny factor in human relationship. Something that makes no sense. When people were paying me three thousand dollars an hour for operations, I could experiment without fear. Some died, some regained their health under my ministrations. But when I experimented on charity patients, I could not experiment because of the 'Protection' given the poor. The masses were not to be guinea pigs. Ha!" laughed Murdoch, "only the rich are permitted to be subjects of an experiment. Touch not the poor, who offer nothing. Experiment upon those of intellect, wealth, fame, or anything that sets them above the mob. Yes, even genius came under my knife. But I couldn't give a poor man a fifty-fifty chance at his life, when the chances of his life were less than one in ten. From a brilliant man, operating under fifty-fifty chances for life, I became an inhuman monster that cut without fear. I was imprisoned, and later escaped with some friends."
"And that's when you stole the _Hippocrates_ and decided that the solar system should pay you revenge money?"
"I would have done better if I had not made that one mistake. I forgot that in the years of imprisonment I fell behind in scientific knowledge. I know now that no one can establish anything at all without technical minds behind him."
Kingman's lips curled. "I wouldn't agree to that."
"You should. Your last defeat at the hands of the technicians you scorn should have taught you a lesson. If you had been sharp, you would have outguessed them; out-engineered them. They, Kingman, were not afraid to rip into their detector to see what made it tick."
"But I had only the one--"
"They knew one simple thing about the universe. That rule is that if anything works once, it may be made to work again." He held up his hand as Kingman started to speak. "You'll bring all sorts of cases to hand and try to disprove me. You can't. Oh, you couldn't cause a quick return of the diplodocus, or re-enact the founding of the solar government, or even re-burn a ton of coal. But there is other carbon, there will be other governmental introductions and reforms, and there may be some day the rebirth of the dinosaur--on some planet there may be carboniferous ages now. Any phenomena that is a true phenomena--and your detector was definite, not a misinterpretation of effect--can be repeated. But, Kingman, we'll not be out-engineered again."
"That I do believe."
"And so we will have our revenge on Venus Equilateral and upon the system itself."
"We're heading home now?"
"Right. We want this ship fitted with the triple turret I mentioned before. Also I want the interconnecting links between the solar intake and the power-projectors beefed up. When you're passing several hundred megawatts through any system, losses of the nature of .000,000,1% cause heating to a dangerous degree. We've got to cut the I²R losses. I gave orders that the turret be started, by the way. It'll be almost ready when we return."
"_You_ gave orders?" said Kingman.
"Oh, yes," said Hellion Murdoch with a laugh. "Remember our _last_ bout with the stock market? I seem to have accumulated about forty-seven percent. That's sufficient to give me control of our company."
"But ... but--" spluttered Kingman. "That took money--"
"I still have enough left," said Murdoch quietly. "After all, I spent years in the Melanortis Country of Venus. I was working on the _Hippocrates_ when I wasn't doing a bit of mining. There's a large vein of platiniridium there. You may answer the rest."
"I still do not get this piracy."
Murdoch's eyes blazed.
"That's my interest. That's my revenge! I intend to ruin Don Channing and Venus Equilateral. With the super turret they'll never be able to catch us, and we'll run the entire system."
Kingman considered. As a lawyer, he was finished. His last try at the ruination of the Venus Equilateral crowd by means of pirating the interplanetary communications beam was strictly a violation of the Communications Code. The latter absolutely prevented any man or group of men from diverting communications not intended for them and using these communications for their own purpose. His defense that Venus Equilateral had also broken the law went unheard. It was pointed out to him that Venus Equilateral tapped his own line, and the tapping of an illegal line was the act of a communications agent in the interest of the government. He was no longer a lawyer, and, in fact, he had escaped a long jail term by sheer bribery.
He was barred from legal practice, and he was barred from any business transactions. The stock market could be manipulated, but only through a blind, which was neither profitable nor safe.
His holdings in Terran Electric were all that stood between him and ruin. He was no better off than Murdoch, save that he was not wanted.
But--
"I'm going to remain on Terra and run Terran Electric like a model company," he said. "That'll be our base."
"Right. Except for a bit of research along specified lines, you will do nothing. Your job will be to act apologetic for your misdeeds. You will grovel on the floor before any authority, and beseech the legal profession to accept you once more. I will need your help, there. You are to establish yourself in the good graces of the Interplanetary Patent Office, and report to me any applications that may be of interest. The research that Terran Electric will conduct will be along innocuous lines. The real research will be in a secret laboratory. The one in the Melanortis Country. Selected men will work there, and the Terran Electric fleet of cargo-carriers will carry the material needed. My main failure was not to have provided a means of knowing what the worlds were doing. I'll have that now, and I shall not be defeated again."
"We'll say that one together!" said Kingman. He flipped open a large book and set the autopilot from a set of figures. The _Black Widow_ turned gently and started to run for Terra at two G.
* * * * *
Walt Franks frowned at the memorandum in his hand. "Look, Don, are we ever going to get to work on that deal with Keg Johnson?"
"Uh-huh," answered Don, without looking up.
"He's serious. Transplanet is getting the edge, and he doesn't like it."
"Frankly, I don't like dabbling in stuff like that either. But Keg's an old friend, and I suppose that's how a guy gets all glommed up on projects, big business deals, and so forth. We'll be going in directly. Why the rush?"
"A bit of personal business on Mars which can best be done at the same time, thus saving an additional trip."
"O.K.," said Don idly. "Might as well get it over with. Date with Christine Baler?"
"Sure," grinned Franks.
Actually, it was less than an hour before the _Relay Girl_ went out of the South End Landing Stage, turned, and headed for Mars. Packing to the Channings was a matter of persuading Arden not to take everything but the drapes in the apartment along with her, while for Walt Franks it was a matter of grabbing a trunkful of instruments and spare parts. Space travel is a matter of waiting for days in the confines of a small bubble of steel. Just waiting. For the scenery is unchanging all the way from Sol to Pluto--and is the same scenery that can be seen from the viewports of Venus Equilateral. Walt enjoyed his waiting time by tinkering; having nothing to do would have bored him, and so he took with him enough to keep him busy during the trip.
At two Terran gravities, the velocity of the _Relay Girl_ built up bit by bit and mile by mile until they were going just shy of one thousand miles per second. This occurred an hour before turnover, which would take place at the twenty-third hour of flight.
And at that time there occurred a rarity. Not an impossibility like the chances of collision with a meteor--those things happen only once in a lifetime, and Channing had had his collision. Nor was it as remote as getting a royal flush on the deal. It happened, not often, but it did happen to ships occasionally.
Another ship passed within detector range.
The celestial globe shimmered faintly and showed a minute point at extreme range. Automatic marker spheres appeared concentrically within the celestial globe and colures and diameters marked the globe off into octants.
Bells rang briefly, and the automatic meteor circuits decided that that object was not approaching the _Relay Girl_. Then they relaxed. Their work was done until another object came within range for them to inspect. They were no longer interested, and they forgot about the object with the same powers of complete oblivion that they would have exerted on a meteor of nickel and iron.
They were mechanically incapable of original thought. So the object, to them, was harmless.
Channing looked up at the luminescent spot, sought the calibration spheres, made a casual observation, and forgot about it. To him it was a harmless meteor.
Even the fact that his own velocity was a thousand miles per second, and the object's velocity was the same, coming to them on a one hundred and seventy degree course and due to pass within five thousand miles did not register. Their total velocity of two thousand miles did not register just because of that rarity with which ships pass within detector range, while meteors are encountered often.
Had Channing been thinking about the subject in earnest, he would have known--for it is only man, with all too little time, who uses such velocities. The universe, with eternity in which to work her miracle, seldom moves in velocities greater than forty or fifty miles per second.
Channing forgot it, and as the marker-spheres switched to accommodate the object, he turned to more important things.
In the other ship, Hellion Murdoch frowned. He brightened, then, and depressed the plunger that energized his solar beam and projector. He did not recognize the oncoming object for anything but a meteor, either; and _his_ desire was to find out how his invention worked at top speeds.
Kingman asked: "Another one?"
"Uh-huh," said Murdoch idly. "I want to check my finders."
"But they can't miss."
"No? Look, lawyer, you're not running a job that may be given a stay or reprieve. The finders run on light velocities. The solar beam runs on the speed of light squared. We'll pass that thing at five thousand miles' distance and at two thousand miles per second velocity. A microsecond of misalignment, and we're missing, see? I think we're going to be forced to put correction circuits in so that the vector sums and velocities and distances will all come out with a true hit. It will not be like sighting down a searchlight beam at high velocity."
"I see. You'll need compensation?"
"Plenty, at this velocity and distance. This is the first time I've had a chance to try it out."
The latter fact saved the _Relay Girl_. By a mere matter of feet and inches; by the difference between the speed of light and the speed of light squared at a distance of five thousand miles, plus a slight miscompensation. The intolerably hot umbra of Murdoch's beam followed below the pilot's greenhouse of the _Relay Girl_ all the way past, a matter of several seconds. The spill-over was tangible enough to warm the _Relay Girl_ to uncomfortable temperatures.
Then with no real damage done, the contact with ships in space was over, but not without a certain minimum of recognition.
"Hell!" said Kingman. "That was a space craft!"
"Who?"
"I don't know. You missed."
"I'd rather have hit," said Murdoch coldly. "I hope I missed by plenty."
"Why?"
"If we scorched their tails any, there'll be embarrassing questions asked."
"So--?"
"So nothing until we're asked. Even then you know nothing."
* * * * *
In the _Relay Girl_, Channing mopped his forehead. "That was hell itself," he said.
Arden laughed uncertainly. "I thought that it would wait until we got there; I didn't expect hell to come after us."
"What--exactly--happened?" asked Walt, coming into the scanning room.
"That--was a spaceship."
"One of this system's?"
"I wonder," said Don honestly. "It makes a guy wonder. It was gone too fast to make certain. It probably was Solarian, but they tried to burn us with something ..."
"That makes it sound like something alien," admitted Walt. "But that doesn't make good sense."
"It makes good reading," laughed Channing. "Walt, you're the Boy Edison. Have you been tinkering with anything of lethal leanings?"
"You think there may be something powerful afloat?"
"Could be. We don't know everything."
"I've toyed with the idea of coupling a solar intake beam with one of those tubes that Baler and Carroll found. Recall, they smashed up quite a bit of Lincoln Head before they uncovered the secret of how to handle it. Now that we have unlimited power--or are limited only by the losses in our own system--we could, or should be able to, make something raw-ther tough."
"You've toyed with the idea, hey?"
"Uh-huh."
"Of course, you haven't really tried it?"
"Of course not."
"How did it work?"
"Fair," grinned Walt. "I did it with miniatures only, of course, since I couldn't get my hooks on a full grown tube."
"Say," asked Arden, "how did you birds arrive at this idea so suddenly? I got lost at the first premise."
"We passed a strange ship. We heated up to uncomfortable temperatures in a matter of nine seconds flat. They didn't warm us with thought waves or vector-invectives. Sheer dislike wouldn't do it alone. I guess that someone is trying to do the trick started by our esteemed Mr. Franks here a year or so ago. Only with something practical instead of an electron beam. Honest-to-goodness energy, right from Sol himself, funnelled through some tricky inventions. What about that experiment of yours? Did you bring it along?"
Walt looked downcast. "No," he said. "It was another one."
"Let's see."
"It's not too good."
"Same idea?"
Walt went to get his experiment. He returned with a tray full of laboratory glassware, all wired into a maze of electronic equipment.
Channing went white. "You, too?" he yelled.
"Take it easy, sport. This charges only to a hundred volts. We get thirteen hundred microfarads at one hundred volts. Then we drain off the dielectric fluid, and get one billion three hundred million volts' charge into a condenser of only one hundred micro-microfarads. It's an idea for the nuclear physics boys. I think it may tend to solidify some of the uncontrollables in the present system of developing high electron velocities."
"That thirteen million dielectric constant stuff is strictly electrodynamic, I think," said Channing. "Farrell may have developed it as a by-product, but I have a hunch that it will replace some heretofore valuable equipment. The Franks-Farrell generator will out-do Van Der Graf's little job, I think."
"Franks-Farrell?"
"Sure. He thunk up the dielectric. You thunk up the application. He won't care, and you couldn't have done it without. Follow?"
"Oh, sure. I was just trying to figure out a more generic term for it."
"Don't. Let it go as it is for now. It's slick, Walt, but there's no weapon in it."
"You're looking for a weapon?"