Part 22

"Hold it," said Walt. "Our velocity with respect to his is about three thousand. We can be certain of the ship by checking the finder-response on the lithium coating. If so, she's the _Black Widow_. Right from here, we can be assured. Jim! Check the finders in the torpedoes on that target!"

"Did," said Jim. "They're on and it is."

"Launch 'em all!" yelled Franks.

"Are you nuts?" asked Channing.

"Why give him a chance to guess what's happening? Launch 'em!"

"Freddie, drop two of the torpedoes and half the 'window.' Send 'em out at ten G. We'll not put all our eggs in one basket," Channing said to Walt. "There might be a slip-up."

"It'll sort of spoil the effect," said Don. "But we're not here for effect."

"What effect?"

"That explosive will be as useless as a slab of soap," said Don. "Explosive depends for its action upon velocity--brother, there ain't no explosive built that will propagate at the velocity of our torpedo against Murdoch."

"I know," said Franks smiling.

"Shall I yell 'Bombs away' in a dramatic voice?" asked Freddie Thomas.

"Are they?"

"Yup."

"Then yell," grinned Walt. "Look, Don, this should be pretty. Let's hike to the star-camera above and watch. We can use the double-telescope finder and take pix, too."

"It won't be long," said Channing grimly. "And we'll be safe, since the interferers will keep Murdoch's gadget so busy he won't have time to worry us. Let's go."

* * * * *

The sky above became filled with a myriad of flashing spots as the rapidly-working meteor spotters coupled to the big turret and began to punch at the interferers.

The clangor of the alarm made Murdoch curse. He looked at the celestial globe and his heart knew real fear for the first time. This was no meteor shower, he knew from the random pattern. Something was after him, and Murdoch knew who and what it was. He cursed Channing and Venus Equilateral in a loud voice.

It did no good, that cursing. Above his head, the triply mounted turret danced back and forth, freeing a triple-needle of Sol's energy. At each pause another bit of tinfoil went out in a blaze of fire. And as the turret destroyed the little dancing motes, more came speeding into range to replace them, ten to one.

And then it happened. The finder-circuit fell into mechanical indecision as two of the canisters of window burst at angles, each with the same intensity. The integrators ground together, and the forces they loosed struggled for control.

Beset by opposing impulses, the amplidyne in the turret stuttered, smoked, and then went out in a pungent stream of yellowish smoke that poured from its dust-cover in a high-velocity stream. The dancing of the turret stopped, and the flashing motes in the sky stopped with the turret's death.

One hundred and thirty farads, charged to ten thousand volts, touched the lithium-coated, aluminum side of Murdoch's _Black Widow_. Thirteen billion joules of electrical energy; thirty-six hundred kilowatt hours went against two inches of aluminum. At the three thousand miles per second relative velocity of the torpedo, contact was immediate and perfect. The aluminum hull vaporized under the million upon million of kilovolt-amperes of the discharge. The vaporized hull tried to explode, but was hit by the unthinkable velocity of the torpedo's warhead.

The torpedo itself crushed in front. It mushroomed under the millions of degrees Kelvin developed by the energy-release caused by the cessation of velocity. For at this velocity the atmosphere within the _Black Widow_ was as immobile and as hard as tungsten steel at its best.

The very molecules themselves could not move fast enough. They crushed together and in compressing brought incandescence.

The energy of the incoming torpedo raced through the _Black Widow_ in a velocity wave that blasted the ship itself into incandescence. In a steep wave-front, the vaporized ship exploded in space like a super-nova.

It blinded the eyes of those who watched. It overexposed the camera film and the expected pictures came out with one single frame a pure, seared black. The piffling, comparatively ladylike detonation of the System's best and most terrible explosive was completely covered in the blast.

Seconds later, the _Relay Girl_ hurtled through the sky three thousand miles to one side of the blast. The driven gases caught the _Girl_ and stove in the upper observation tower like an eggshell. The _Relay Girl_ strained at her girders, and sprung leaks all through the rigid ship, and after rescuing Don Channing and Walt Franks from the wreckage of the observation dome, the men spent their time welding cracks until the _Relay Girl_ landed.

It was Walt who put his finger on the trouble. "That was period for Murdoch," he said. "But Don, the stooge still runs loose. We're going to be forced to take over Mark Kingman before we're a foot taller. He includes Terran Electric, you know. That's where Murdoch got his machine work done."

"Without Murdoch, Kingman is fairly harmless," said Don, objecting. "We'll have no more trouble from him."

"You're a sucker, Don. Kingman will still be after your scalp. You mark my words."

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

"Nothing for the present. I've still got that date with Christine at Lincoln Head. Mind?"

_Interlude:_

_Not all inventions and discoveries need be deadly. Yet if the matter is considered deeply enough, inventions and discoveries are, in a sense, deadly to something. The automobile sounded the knell of the blacksmith. Gutenberg stopped the widespread trade of the official scribes, who spent their working day writing books by hand._

_It is also quite safe to assume that inventors themselves seldom realize the effect their contributions will have upon the future. Did the Wright brothers ever stand upon that hill near Dayton, Ohio, where they flew box kites, and believe that within the span of a lifetime that hill would be surrounded on all sides by the solid acres of land that now bears their name: Wright Field? Did James Clerk Maxwell, in postulating his Electromagnetic Equations, ever conceive of the massive industry that was to grow around the art of radio transmission? Did Thomas Alva Edison contemplate Times Square when he was seeking a more efficient means of illumination?_

_Yes, inventions are all deadly in one sense or another. They are openly considered so when their effect kills human beings. Few inventions are conceived with the intent of producing murder, the atomic bomb notwithstanding._

_THAT little fiendish device was the accumulation of knowledges and sciences gathered by men who were seeking knowledge for the sake of knowledge and it was not until the need arose and the facts became clear that the idea of Atomic Power for Military Purposes became fact._

_Similarly, Walt Franks didn't really know what he was starting when he began to think about the next big project for Venus Equilateral._

_You see, by reasoning, Walt assumed that if men could send intelligence and energy by beam transmission, there was no reason why men couldn't send--THINGS._

SPECIAL DELIVERY

Don Channing grinned at his wife knowingly. Arden caught his glance and then laughed. Walt Franks leaned back and looked highly superior. "Go ahead and laugh, darn you. I tell you it can be done."

"Walt, ever since you tried that stunt of aerating soap with hydrogen to make a floating soap for shower baths, I've been wondering about your kind of genius."

"Oh, no," objected Arden.

"Well, he wondered about it after nearly breaking his neck one morning."

"That I did," grinned Walt. "It's still a good idea."

"But the idea of transmitting matter is fantastic."

"Agreed," admitted Walt. "But so is the idea of transmitting power."

"It would come in handy if possible," remarked Don. "At slightly under two G, it takes only four hours to make Luna from Terra. On the other hand, shipping stuff from Melbourne, Australia, to New York City, or to the Mojave spaceport takes considerably longer. Spacecraft as super stratosphere carriers aren't too good, because you've got to run in a circle. In space you run at constant acceleration to mid-point and then decelerate the rest of the way. Fine for mile-eating, but not too hot for cutting circles."

"Well, having established the need of a matter transmitter, now what?"

"Go on, Walt. You're telling us."

"Well," said Walt, pencilling some notes on the tablecloth, "it's like this. The Carroll-Baler power-transmission tube will carry energy. According to their initial experiments, they had some trouble."

"They had one large amount, if I recall."

"Specifically, I recall the incident of the hammer. Remember?"

"Barney Carroll got mad and swung a hammer at the tube, didn't he?"

"It was one of them. I don't recall which."

"No matter of importance," said Don. "I think I know what you mean. He hit the intake end--or tried to. The hammer was cut neatly and precisely off, and the energy of the blow was transmitted, somehow, to the wall."

"Through the wall," corrected Walt. "It cracked the plaster, but it went through so fast that it merely cracked it. The main blow succeeded in breaking the marble facade of the city hall."

"Um. Now bring us up to date. What have you in mind?"

"A tube which scans matter, atom by atom, line by line and plane by plane. The matter is removed, atom by atom, and transmitted by a sort of matter bank in the instrument."

"A what?"

"Matter bank," said Walt. "We can't transmit the stuff itself. That's out. We can't dissipate the atomic energy or whatever effect we might get. We can establish a balance locally by using the energy release to drive the restorer. According to some initial experiments, it can be done. We take something fairly complex and break it down. We use the energy of destruction to re-create the matter in the bank, or solid block of local stuff. Let it be a mass of stuff if it wants to, at any rate, the signal impulses from the breakdown will be transmitted, scanned if you will, and transmitted to a receiver which reverses the process. It scans, and the matter bank is broken down and the object is reconstructed."

"I hope we can get free and unrestricted transmutation," offered Don. "You can't send a steel spring out and get one back made of copper."

"I get your point."

"The space lines will hate you," said Arden.

"Too bad. I wonder if it'll carry people."

"Darling," drawled Arden, "don't you think you'd better catch your rabbit first?"

"Not too bad a thought," agreed Don. "Walt, have you got any rabbit traps out?"

"A couple. I've been tinkering a bit. I know we can disintegrate matter through a power-tube of slight modification, and reintegrate it with another. At the present state of the art, it is a mess."

"A nice mess," laughed Don. "Go ahead, though. We'll pitch in when the going gets hard."

"That's where I stand now. The going is tough."

"What's the trouble?"

"Getting a perfect focus. I want it good enough so that we can scan a polished sheet of steel--and it'll come out as slick as the original."

"Naturally. We'd better get Wes Farrell on the job."

"I wonder what by-product he'll get this time?"

"Look, Walt. Quit hoping. If you get this thing running right, it'll put your name in history."

"After all," grinned Walt, "I've got to do something good enough to make up for that Channing Layer."

"Kingman is still fuming over the Channing Layer. Sometimes I feel sorry that I did it to him like that."

"Wasn't your fault, Don. You didn't hand him the thing knowing that the Channing Layer would inhibit the transmission of energy. It happened. We get power out of Sol--why shouldn't they? They would, except for the Channing Layer."

"Wonder what your idea will do."

"About the Channing Layer? Maybe your spaceline competition is not as good as it sounds."

"Well, they use the power-transmission tubes all over the face of the Solar System. I can't see any reason why they couldn't ship stuff from Sydney to Mojave and then space it out from there."

"What an itinerary! By Franks' matter transmitter to Mojave. Spacecraft to Luna. More matter transmission from Luna to Phobos. Then trans-shipped down to Lincoln Head, and by matter transmitter to Canalopsis. _Whoosh!_"

"Do we have time to go into the old yarn about the guy who listened in and got replicas?" asked Arden.

"That's a woman's mind for you," grinned Channing. "Always making things complicated. Arden, my lovely but devious-minded woman, let's wait until we have the spry beastie by the ears before we start to make rabbit pie."

"It's not as simple as it sounds," warned Walt. "But it's there to worry about."

"But later. I doubt that we can reason that angle out."

"I can," said Arden. "Can we tap the power beams?"

"Wonderful is the mind of woman," praised Don. "Positively wonderful! Arden, you have earned your next fur coat. Here I've been thinking of radio transmission all this time. No, Arden, when you're set up for sheer energy transmission, it's strictly no dice. The crimped up jobs we use for communications can be tapped--but not the power transmission beams. If you can keep the gadget working on that line, Walt, we're in and solid."

"I predict there'll be a battle. Are we shipping energy or communications?"

"Let Kingman try and find a precedent for that. Brother Blackstone himself would be stumped to make a ruling. We'll have to go to work with the evidence as soon as we get a glimmer of the possibilities. But I think we have a good chance. We can diddle up the focus, I'm certain."

Arden glowered. "Go ahead--have your fun. I see another couple of weeks of being a gadgeteer's widow." She looked at Walt Franks. "I could stand it if the big lug only didn't call every tool, every part, and every effect either _she_ or _baby_!"

Walt grinned. "I'd try to keep you from being lonely, but I'm in this, too, and besides, you're my friend's best wife."

"Shall we drag that around a bit? I think we could kill a couple of hours with it sometime."

"Let it lie there and rot," snorted Channing cheerfully. "We'll pick it up later. Come on, Walt. We've got work to do."

* * * * *

Mark Kingman glowered at the 'gram and swore under his breath. He wondered whether he might be developing a persecution complex; it seemed as though every time he turned around, Venus Equilateral was in his hair, asking for something or other. And he was not in any position to quibble about it. Kingman was smart enough to carry his tray very level. Knowing that they were waiting for a chance to prove that he had been connected with the late Hellion Murdoch made him very cautious. There was no doubt in any mind that Murdoch was written off the books, but whether Murdoch had made a sufficiently large impression on the books of Terran Electric to have the connection become evident--that worried Kingman.

So he swore at each telegram that came in, but quietly, and followed each request to the letter. Compared to his former attitude toward Venus Equilateral, Mark Kingman was behaving like an honor student in a Sunday school.

Furthermore, behaving himself did not make him feel good.

He punched the buzzer, told his secretary to call in the shop foreman, and then sat back and wondered about the 'gram.

He was still wondering when the man entered. Kingman looked up and fixed his superintendent with a fishy glance. "Horman, can you guess why the Venus Equilateral crowd would want two dozen gauge blocks?"

"Sure. We use Johannson blocks all the time."

"Channing wants twenty-four blocks. All three inches on a side--cubes. Square to within thirty seconds of angle, and each of the six faces optically flat to one-quarter wave length of cadmium light."

"_Whoosh!_" said Horman. "I presume the three-inch dimension must be within a half wave length?"

"They're quite lenient," said Kingman bitterly. "A full wave length!"

"White of them," grunted Horman. "I suppose the same thing applies?"

"We're running over thin ice," said Kingman reflectively. "I can't afford to play rough. We'll make up their blocks."

"I wonder what they want 'em for?"

"Something tricky, I'll bet."

"But what could you use two dozen gauge blocks for? All the same size."

"Inspection standards?" asked Kingman.

"Not unless they're just being difficult. You don't put primary blocks on any production line. You make secondary gauges for production line use and keep a couple of primaries in the check room to try the secondaries on. In fact, you usually have a whole set of gauge blocks to build up to any desired dimension so that you don't have to stock a half-million of different sizes."

"It's possible that they may be doing something extremely delicate?"

"Possible," said Horman slowly. "But not too probable. On the other hand, I may be one hundred percent wrong. I don't know all the different stuff a man can make, by far. My own experience indicates that nothing like that would be needed. But that's just one man's experience."

"Channing and that gang of roughneck scientists have been known to make some fancy gadgets," said Kingman grudgingly.

"If you'll pardon my mentioning the subject," said Horman in a scathing tone, "you'd have been far better off to tag along with 'em instead of fighting 'em."

"I'll get 'em yet."

"What's it got you so far?"

"I'm not too bad off. I've come up from the Chief Legal Counsel of Terran Electric to controlling the company."

"And Terran Electric has slid down from the topmost outfit in the system to a seventh rater."

"We'll climb back. At any rate, I'm better off personally. You're better off personally. In fact, everybody that had enough guts to stay with us is better off."

"Yeah--I know. It sounds good on paper. But make a bum move again, Kingman, and we'll all be in jail. You'd better forget that hatred against Venus Equilateral and come down to earth."

"Well, I've been a good boy for them once. After all, I did point out the error in their patent on the solar beam."

"That isn't all. Don't forget that Terran Electric's patent was at error, too."

"Frankly, it was a minor error. It's one of those things that is easy to get caught on. You know how it came about?"

"Nope. I accepted it just like everybody else. It took some outsider to laugh at me and tell me why."

Kingman smiled. "It's easy to get into easy thinking. They took power from Sirius--believe it or not--and then made some there-and-back time measurements and came up with a figure that was about the square of one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second. But you know that you can't square a velocity and come up with anything that looks sensible. The square of a velocity must be some concept like an expanding area."

"Or would it be two spots diverging along the sides of a right angle?" queried Horman idly. "What was their final answer?"

"The velocity of light is a concept. It is based on the flexibility of space--its physical constants, so to speak. Channing claims that the sub-etheric radiation bands of what we have learned to call the driver radiation propagates along some other medium than space itself. I think they were trying to establish some mathematical relation--which might be all right, but you can't establish that kind of relation and hope to hold it. The square of C in meters comes out differently than the square of C in miles, inches, or a little-used standard, the light-second, in which the velocity of light is unity, or One. Follow? Anyway, they made modulation equipment of some sort and measured the velocity and came up with a finite figure which is slightly less than the square of one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second. Their original idea was wrong. It was just coincidence that the two figures came out that way. Anyway," smiled Kingman, "I pointed it out to them and they quick changed their patent letters. So, you see, I've been of some help."

"Nice going. Well, I'm going to make those gauges. It'll take us one long time, too. Johannson Blocks aren't the easiest things in the world to make."

"What would you make secondary standards out of?"

"We use glass gauges, mostly. They don't dinge or bend when dropped--they go to pieces or not at all. We can't have a bent gauge rejecting production parts, you know, and steel gauges can be bent. Besides, you can grind glass to a half wave length of light with ease, but polishing steel is another item entirely."

"I'm going to call Channing and ask him about glass blocks. It may be that he might use them. Plus the fact that I may get an inkling of the ultimate use. They have no production lines running on Venus Equilateral, have they?"

"Nope. Not at all. They're not a manufacturing company."

"Well, I'm going to call."

Kingman's voice raced across Terra to Hawaii, went on the communications beams of the sky-pointing reflectors, and rammed through the Heaviside Layer to Luna. At the Lunar Station, his voice was mingled in multiplex with a thousand others and placed on the sub-ether beams to Venus Equilateral.

Don Channing answered the 'phone. "Yes?"

"Kingman, Dr. Channing."

Don grunted. He did not like to be addressed by title when someone who disliked him did it. His friends did not; Kingman's use of the title made it an insult.

"Look," said Kingman, "what do you want to use those blocks for?"

"We've got a job of checking dimensions."

"Nothing more? Do you need the metal for electrical reasons?"

"No," said Don, "what have you in mind?"

"Our tool shop is nicely equipped to grind glass gauges. We can do that better than grinding Jo-blocks. Can you use glass ones?"

"Hang on a minute." Channing turned to Walt. "Kingman says his outfit uses glass gauges. Any reason why we can't?"

"See no reason why not. I've heard of using glass gauges, and they've got some good reasons, too. Tell him to go ahead."

"Kingman? How soon can we get glass ones?"

"Horman, how soon on the glass blocks?"

"Two dozen? About a week."

"We'll have your blocks on the way within four days, Channing. Four days minimum, plus whatever wait is necessary to get 'em aboard a spacer."

"We'll check from this end on schedules. We need the blocks, and if the wait is too long, we'll send the _Relay Girl_ in for 'em."

Don hung up and then said: "Glass ones might be a good idea. We can check the transmission characteristics optically. I think we can check more, quicker, than by running analysis on steel."

"Plus the fact that you can get the blocks back after test," grinned Walt. "Once you tear into a steel block to check its insides, you've lost your sample. I don't know any better way to check homogeneity than by optical tests."

"O.K. Well, four days for glass blocks will do better than a couple of months on steel blocks."

"Right. Now let's look up Wes and see what he's come up with."

They found Farrell in one of the blister laboratories, working on a small edition of the power transmission tubes. He was not dressed in spacesuit, and so they entered the blister and watched him work.

"Have a little trouble getting the focus to stay sharp through the trace," complained Wes. "I can get focus of atomic proportions--the circle of confusion is about the size of the atom nucleus, I mean--at the axis of the tube. But the deflection of the cone of energy produces aberration, which causes coma at the edges. The corners of an area look fierce."

"I wonder if mechanical scanning wouldn't work better."

"Undoubtedly. You don't hope to send life, do you?"

"It would be nice--but no more fantastic than this thing is now. What's your opinion?"