Part 6

"So we mount a couple of mirrors at either end of the station, and key a beam of light from the center, heading each way. When the pulses arrive at the space flitter at the same time, he's in position. We'll establish original range by radar, of course, but once the proper interval or range is established, the pilot can maintain his own position by watching the pulsed-arrival of the twin-flickers of light. Just like loran, excepting that we'll use light, and we can key it so it will run alternately, top and bottom. To maintain the proper angle, all the pilot will have to do is to keep the light alternating--fluently. Any overlapping will show him that he's drifted."

"Fine!" glowed Walt. "Now, how the devil long will it take?"

"Ask the boys, Walt," suggested Don.

Walt made a canvass of the machine shop gang, and came back, saying: "Couple of hours, God willing."

The mounting of the mirrors at either end of the station took little time. It was the amount of detailed work that took time; the devising of the interrupting mechanism; and the truing-up of the mirrors that took the time.

Then it became evident that there was more. There were several hundred doorways centered on the axis of Venus Equilateral that must be opened, the space cleared of packing cases, supplies, and in a few cases machinery had to be partially dismantled to clear the way. A good portion of Venus Equilateral's personnel of three thousand were taken off their jobs, haled out of bed for the emergency, or made to work through their play period, depending upon which shift they worked.

The machinery could be replaced, the central storage places could be refilled, and the many doors closed again. But the central room containing the air plant was no small matter. Channing took a sad look at the lush growth of Martian saw grass and sighed. It was growing nicely now, they had nurtured it into lusty growth from mere sprouts in trays and it was as valuable--precisely--as the lives of the three thousand-odd that lived, loved, and pursued happiness on Venus Equilateral. It was a youthful plant, a replacement brought in a tearing hurry from Mars to replace the former plant that was heaved out by the well-meaning Burbank.

Channing closed his eyes and shuddered in mock horror. "Chop out the center," he said.

The "center" meant the topmost fronds of the long blades; their roots were embedded in the trays that filled the cylindrical floor. Some of the blades would die--Martian saw grass is tender in spite of the wicked spines that line the edge--but this was an emergency with a capital E.

Cleaning the centermost channel out of the station was no small job. The men who put up Venus Equilateral had no idea that someone would be using the station for a sighting tube some day. The many additions to the station through the years made the layout as regular and as well-planned as the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.

So for hour upon hour, men swarmed in the central, weightless channel and wielded acetylene torches, cutting steel. Not in all cases, but there were many. In three miles of storage rooms, a lot of doors and bulkheads can be thrown up without crowding the size of the individual rooms.

Channing spoke into the microphone at the north end of Venus Equilateral, and said: "Walt? We've got a sight. Can you see?"

"Yop," said Walt. "And say, what happens to me after that bum guess?"

"That was quite a stretch, Walt. That 'hour, God willing,' worked itself into four hours, God help us."

"O.K., so I was optimistic. I thought that those doors were all on the center line."

"They are supposed to be, but they aren't huge and a little misalignment can do a lot of light-stopping. Can we juggle mirrors now?"

"Sure as shooting. Freddie in the flitter?"

"Yup. He thinks he's at the right distance now. But he's got a light outfit, and this radar can be calibrated to the foot. Is the mirror-dingbat running?"

"We're cooking with glass right now."

"Brother," groaned Channing, "if I had one of those death rays that the boys were crowing about back in the days before space-hopping became anything but a bit of fiction, I'd scorch your ears--or burn 'em off--or blow holes in you--or disintegrate you--depending on what stories you read. I haven't heard such a lousy pun in seventeen years--Hey, Freddie, you're a little close. Run out a couple of miles, huh?--and, Walt, I've heard some doozies."

There was a click in the phones and a cheerful voice chimed in with: "Good morning, fellows. What's with the Great Quest?"

Channing answered, "Hi, Babe, been snoozing?"

"Sure, as any sensible person would. Have you been up all the time?"

"Yeah. We're still up against the main trouble with telephones--the big trouble, same as back in 1887--our friends have no telephone! You'd be surprised how elusive a spaceship can be in the deep. Sort of a non-existent, microscopic speck, floating in absolutely nothing. We have a good idea of where they should be, and possibly why and what--but we're really playing with blindfolds, handcuffs, ear plugs, mufflers, nose clamps, and tongue-ties. I am reminded--Hey, Freddie, about three more hundred yards--of the two blind men."

"Never mind the blind men," came back the pilot. "How'm I doing?"

"Fine. Slide out another hundred yards and hold her there."

"Who--me? Listen, Dr. Channing, you're the bird on the tape line. You have no idea just how insignificant you look from fifty-odd thousand miles away. Put a red-hot on the 'finders and have 'im tell me where the ship sits."

"O.K., Freddie, you're on the beam and I'll put a guy on here to give you the dope. Right?"

"Right!"

"Right," echoed Arden breaking in on the phone. "And I'm going to bring you a slug of coffee and a roll. Or did you remember to eat recently?"

"We didn't," chimed in Walt.

"You get your own girl," snorted Channing. "And besides, you are needed up here. We've got work to do."

Once again the signal lashed out. The invisible waves drove out and began their swift rush across the void. Time, as it always did during the waiting periods, hung like a Sword of Damocles. The half-hour finally ticked away, and Freddie called in: "No dice. She's as silent as the grave."

Minutes added together into an hour. The concentric wave left the reflector and just dropped out of sight.

"Too bad you can't widen her out," suggested Don.

"I'd like to tighten it down," objected Walt. "I think we're losing power and we can't increase the power--but we could tighten the beam."

"Too bad you can't wave it back and forth like a fireman squirting water on a lawn," said Arden.

"Firemen don't water lawns--" began Walt Franks, but he was interrupted by a wild yell from Channing.

"Something hurt?" asked Arden.

"No. Walt, we can wave the beam."

"Until we find 'em? We've been trying that. No worky."

Freddie called in excitedly: "Something went by just now and I don't think it was Christmas!"

"We might have hit 'em a dozen times in the last ten minutes and we'll never know it," said Channing. "But the spaceliners can be caught. Let's shoot at them like popping ducks. Shotgun effect. Look, Walt, we can electronically dance the beam at a high rate of speed, spraying the neighborhood. Freddie can hear us return because we have to hit them all the time and the waver coming on the way back will pass through his position again and again. We'll set up director elements in the reflector, distorting the electrical surface of the parabolic reflector. That'll divert the beam. By making the phases swing right, we can scan the vicinity of the _Empress of Kolain_ like a flying spot television camera."

Walt turned to one of the technicians and explained. The man nodded. He left for Franks' laboratory and Walt turned back to his friends.

"Here shoots another couple of hours. I, for one, am going to grab forty winks."

Jim, the beam-control man, sat down and lighted a cigarette. Freddie let his flitter coast free. And the generators that fed the powerful transmitter came whining to a stop. But there was no sleep for Don and Walt. They kept awake to supervise the work, and to help in hooking up the phase-splitting circuit that would throw out-of-phase radio frequency into the director-elements to swing the beam.

Then once again the circuits were set up. Freddie found the position again and began to hold it. The beam hurled out again, and as the phase-shift passed from element to element, the beam swept through an infinitesimal arc that covered thousands of miles of space by the time the beam reached the position occupied by the _Empress of Kolain_.

Like a painter, the beam painted in a swipe a few hundred miles wide and swept back and forth, each sweep progressing ahead of the stripe before by less than its width. It reached the end of its arbitrary wall and swept back to the beginning again, covering space as before. Here was no slow, irregular swing of mechanical reflector, this was the electronically controlled wavering of a stable antenna.

And this time the half hour passed slowly but not uneventfully. Right on the tick of the instant, Freddie called back: "Got 'em!"

It was a weakling beam that came back in staccato surges. A fading, wavering, spotty signal that threatened to lie down on the job and sleep. It came and it went, often gone for seconds and never strong for so much as a minute. It vied, and almost lost completely, with the constant crackle of cosmic static. It fought with the energies of the Sun's corona and was more than once the underdog. Had this returning beam carried intelligence of any sort it would have been wasted. About all that could be carried on a beam as sorry as this was the knowledge that there was a transmitter--and that it was transmitting.

But its raucous note synchronized with the paint-brush wiping of the transmitter. There was no doubt.

* * * * *

Don Channing put an arm around Arden's waist and grinned at Walt Franks. "Go to work, genius. I've got the _Empress of Kolain_ on the pipe. You're the bright-eyed lad that is going to wake them up! We've shot almost twenty hours of our allotted fifty. Make with the megacycles, Walter. Arden and I will take in a steak, a moom pitcher, and maybe a bit of woo. Like?" he asked the girl.

"I like," she answered.

Walt Franks smiled and stretched lazily. He made no move to the transmitter. "Don't go away," he cautioned them. "Better call up Joe and order beer and sandwiches for the boys in the back room. On you!"

"Make with the signals first," said Channing. "And lay off the potables until we finish this silly job."

"You've got it. Is there a common, garden variety, transmitting key in the place?"

"Probably. We'll have to ask. Why?"

"Ask me."

Don removed his arm from Arden's waist. He picked up a spanner and advanced on Franks.

"No!" objected Arden. "Poison him--I can't stand the sight of blood. Or better, bamboo splinters under the fingernails. He knows something simple, the big bum!"

"Beer and sandwiches?" asked Walt.

"Beer and sandwiches," agreed Don. "Now, Tom Swift, what gives?"

"I want to key the beam. Y'see, Don, we're using the same frequency, by a half dozen megacycles, as their meteor spotter. I'm going to retune the beam to their frequency and key it. Realize what'll happen?"

"Sure," agreed Don, "but you're still missing the boat. You can't transmit keyed intelligence with an intermittent contact."

"In words, what do you mean, Don?" asked Arden.

"International Code is a series of dots and dashes, you may know. Our wabbling beam is whipping through the area in which the _Empress of Kolain_ is passing. Therefore the contact is intermittent. And how could you tell a dot from a dash?"

"Easy," bragged Walt Franks. "We're not limited to the speed of deviation, are we?"

"Yes--limited by the speed of the selsyn motors that transfer the phase-shifting circuits to the director radiators. Yeah, I get it, Edison, and we can wind them up to a happy six or eight thousand r. p. m. Six would get us a hundred cycles per second--a nice, low growl."

"And how will they receive that kind of signal on the meteor spotter?" asked Arden.

"The officer of the day will be treated to the first meteor on record that has intermittent duration--it is there only when it spells in International Code!"

Prying the toy transmitting key from young James Burke was a job only surpassed in difficulty by the task of opening the vault of the Interplanetary Bank after working hours. But Burke, Junior, was plied with soda pop, ice cream, and candy. He was threatened, cajoled, and finally bribed. And what Venus Equilateral paid for the toy finally would have made the toy manufacturer go out and look for another job. But Walt Franks carried the key to the scene of operations and set it on the bench to look at it critically.

"A puny gadget, at that," he said, clicking the key. "Might key a couple of hundred watts with it--but not too long. She'd go up like a skyrocket under our load!"

Walt opened up a cabinet and began to pull out parts. He piled several parts on a bread board, and in an hour had a very husky thyraton hooked into a circuit that was simplicity itself. He hooked the thyraton into the main power circuit and tapped the key gingerly. The transmitter followed the keyed thyraton and Don took a deep breath.

"Do you know code?" he asked.

"Used to. Forgot it when I came to Venus Equilateral. Used to hold a ham ticket on Terra. But there's no use hamming on the station here where you can wake somebody by yelling at the top of your voice. The thing to ask is, 'Does anyone know code on board the _Empress of Kolain_?'"

They forgot their keying circuit and began to adjust the transmitter to the frequency used by the meteor spotter. It was a job. But it was done, all the way from the master oscillator stage through the several frequency doubler stages and to the big power-driver stage. The output stage came next, and then a full three hours of tinkering with files and hacksaws were required to adjust the length of the main radiator and the director elements so that their length became right for the changed frequency.

Finally Walt took the key and said: "Here goes!"

He began to rattle the key. In the power room the generators screamed and the lights throughout the station flickered just a bit at the sudden surges.

Don Channing said to Arden: "If someone of the _Empress of Kolain_ can understand code--"

* * * * *

The _Empress of Kolain_ was zipping along in its silent passage through the void. It was an unseen, undetected, unaware bit of human manufacture marking man's will among the stars. In all the known universe it moved against the forces of celestial mechanics because some intelligent mote that infested the surface of a planet once had the longing to visit the stars. In all the Solar System, most of the cosmic stuff was larger than it--but it alone defied the natural laws of space.

Because it alone possessed the required _outside_ force spoken of in Newton's "Universal Laws."

And it was doing fine.

Dinner was being served in the dining room. A group of shapely girls added grace to the swimming pool on the promenade deck. The bar was filled with a merry crowd which in turn were partly filled with liquor. A man in uniform, the Second Officer, was throwing darts with a few passengers in the playroom, and there were four oldish ladies on sabbatical leave who were stricken with _mal-de-void_.

The passage up to now had been uneventful. A meteor or two had come to make the ship swing a bit--but the swerve was less than the pitch of an ocean vessel in a moderate sea and it did not continue as did an ocean ship. Most of the time the _Empress of Kolain_ seemed as steady as solid rock.

Only the First Officer, on the bridge, and the Chief Pilot, far below in the Control Room, knew just how erratic their course truly was. But they were not worried. They were not a shell, fired from a gun; they were a spaceship, capable of steering themselves into any port on Venus when they arrived and the minute wobbulations in their course could be corrected when the time came. For nothing had ever prevented a ship of space from seeing where it was going.

Yes, it was uneventful.

Then the meteor screen flashed into life. A circle of light appeared in the celestial globe and the ship's automatic pilot swerved ever so little. The dot of light was gone.

Throughout the ship, people laughed nervously. A waiter replaced a glass of water that had been set too close to the edge of the table and a manly-looking fellow dived into the swimming pool to haul a good-looking blonde to the edge again. She'd been in the middle of a swan dive when the swerve came and the ship had swerved without her. The resounding smack of feminine stomach against the water was of greater importance than the meteor, now so many hundred miles behind.

The flash of light returned and the ship swerved again. Upon the third swerve, the First Officer was watching the celestial globe with suspicion. He went white. It was conceivable that the _Empress of Kolain_ was about to encounter a meteor shower.

And that was bad.

He marked the place and set his observation telescope in synchronism with the celestial globe. He searched the sky. There was nothing but the ultimate starry curtain in the background. He snapped a switch and the voice of the pilot came out of a speaker in the wall.

"You called, Mr. Hendall?"

"Tony, take the levers, will you please? Something is rotten in the State of Denmark."

"O.K., sir. I'm riding personal."

"Kick out the meteor-spotter coupling circuits and forget the alarm."

"Right, Mr. Hendall, but will you confirm that in writing?"

Hendall scribbled on the telautograph and then abandoned the small 'scope. The flashing in the celestial globe continued, but the ship no longer danced in its path. Hendall went up into the big dome.

The big twenty-inch Cassegrain showed nothing at all, and Hendall returned to the bridge scratching his head. Nothing on the spotting 'scope and nothing on the big instrument.

That intermittent spot was large enough to mean a huge meteor. But wait. At the speed of the _Empress_, it should have retrogressed in the celestial globe unless it was so huge and so far away--but Sol didn't appear on the globe and it was big and far away, bigger by far. Nothing short of a planet at less-than-planetary distances would do this.

Not even a visible change in the position of the spot.

"Therefore," thought Hendall, "this is no astral body that makes this spot!"

Hendall went to a cabinet and withdrew a cable with a plug on either end. He plugged one end into the test plug on the meteor spotter and the opposite end into the speaker. A low humming emanated from the speaker in synchronism with the flashing of the celestial globe.

It hit a responsive chord.

Hendall went to the main communication microphone and spoke. His voice went all over the _Empress of Kolain_ from pilot room and cargo spaces to swimming pool and infirmary.

"Attention!" he said in a formal voice. "Attention to official orders!"

Dancers stopped in midstep. Swimmers paused and then made their way to the edges of the pool and sat with their feet dangling in the warm water. Diners sat with their forks poised foolishly.

"Official orders!" meant an emergency.

Hendall continued: "I believe that something never before tried is being attempted. I am forced against my better knowledge to believe that some agency is trying to make contact with us; a spaceship in flight! This is unknown in the annals of space flying and is, therefore, indicative of something important. It would not have been tried without preparations unless an emergency exists.

"However, the requirements of an officer of space do not include a knowledge of code because of the lack of communication with the planets while in space. Therefore, I request that any person with a working knowledge of International Morse will please present himself to the nearest officer."

Minutes passed. Minutes during which the flashing lights continued.

Then the door of the bridge opened and Third Officer Jones entered with a thirteen-year-old youngster at his heels. The boy's eyes went wide at the sight of the instruments on the bridge, and he looked around in amazed interest.

"This is Timmy Harris," said Jones. "He knows code!"

"Go to it, Mr. Harris," said Hendall.

The boy swelled visibly. You could almost hear him thinking: "He called me 'mister'!"

Then he went to the table by the speaker and reached for pencil and paper. "It's code all right," he said. Then Timmy winked at Jones, "He has a lousy fist!"

Timmy Harris began to write.

"--course and head for Terra direct"--the beam faded for seconds--"Venusian fever and you will be quarantined.

"Calling CQ, calling CQ, calling CQ. Calling _Empress of Kolain_ ... empowered us to contact you and convey ... message--you are requested to correct your course and head ... a plague of Venusian fever and you--Johnson of Interplanet has empowered us ... the following message: 'You are requested to correct your ... head for Terra direct.' Calling CQ...."

"Does that hash make sense to you?" asked Jones of Hendall.

"Sure," smiled Hendall, "it is fairly plain. It tells us that Keg Johnson of Interplanet wants us to head for Terra direct because of a plague of Venusian fever that would cause us to stay in quarantine. That would ruin the Line Moss. Prepare to change course, Mr. Jones!"

"Who could it be?" asked Jones foolishly.

"There is only one outfit in the Solar System that could possibly think of a stunt like this. And that is Channing and Franks. This signal came from Venus Equilateral!"

"Wait a minute," said Timmy Harris. "Here's some more."

"'As soon as this signal--intelligible--at right angles to your course for ten minutes. That will take--out of--beam and reflected--will indicate to us--left the area and know of our attempt.'"

"They're using a beam of some sort that indicates to them that we are on the other end but we can't answer. Mr. Jones, and Pilot Canton, ninety degrees north for ten minutes! Call the navigation officer to correct our course. I'll make the announcement to the passengers. Mr. Harris, you are given the freedom of the bridge for the remainder of the trip."

Mr. Harris was overwhelmed. He'd learn plenty--and that would help him when he applied for training as a space officer; unless he decided to take a position with Venus Equilateral when he grew up.

The signal faded from the little cruiser and silence prevailed. Don spoke into the microphone and said: "Run her up a millisecond," to the beam controller. The beam wiped the space above the previous course for several minutes and Franks was sending furiously:

"You have answered our message. We'll be seeing you!"

Channing told the man in the cruiser to return. He kicked the main switch and the generators whined down the scale and coasted to a stop. Tube filaments darkened and meters returned to zero.

"O.K., Warren. Let the spinach lay. Get the next crew to clean up the mess and polish the set-up into something presentable. I'll bet a cooky that we'll be chasing spaceships all the way to Pluto after this. We'll work it into a fine thing and perfect our technique. Right now I owe the gang a dinner."

_Interlude:_

_When necessity dictates a course of action and the course of action proves valuable, it is but a short step to the inclusion of the answer into the many facets of modern technical civilization. Thus it was that not many months after Venus Equilateral successfully established planet-to-ship communications with the "Empress of Kolain" that all course constants were delivered to the relay station and thereafter messages were transmitted as a part of the regular business of Interplanetary Communications._