George O. Smith

“ And as the days wore on, Kingman's group manipulated their watered stock and ran the price up and down at will, and after each cycle Kingman's outfit owned just one bit more of Venus Equilateral.
Terran Electric would emerge from this battle with Interplanetary Communications as a subsidiary—with Kingman at the helm!
Walt Franks entered Channing's office with a wild-eyed look on his face. "Don! C2!"
"Huh? What are you driving about?"
"C2. The speed of light, squared!"
"Fast—but what is it?"
"The solar beam! It propagates at C2!"
"Oh, now look. Nothing can travel that fast!" ”

“ What were you saying about gaining, Walt?"
"Oh, I was saying that I was tinkering around the skyways with the Anopheles—that's the ship we hooked up with the solar beam for power, you know—and I got to wondering about that discrepancy. The faster you go, the greater is the angular displacement, and then with some measurements, I came up with a bugger factor—"
"Woah, goodness," laughed Christine. "What is a bugger factor?"
"You'll learn," said Arden, "that the boys out here have a language all their own. ”

“ Stuff was dumped at Northern Landing, and there was a wild flurry of bulling at Canalopsis. The Terran Exchange was just flopping up and down in a general upheaval, with the boys selling at the top and buying at the bottom. That makes money, you know, and if you can make the market tick your way—I mean control enough stuff—your purchases at the bottom send the market up a few points and then you dump it, and it drops again. It wouldn't take more than a point or two to make a guy rich, if you had enough stock and could continue to make the market vacillate. ”

“ Then, as no more stock was offered, Interplanetary Communications Preferred rose sharply to ninety-four and stabilized at that figure. Terran Electric stock went through a valley, made by Kingman's sales, and then headed up, made by purchases on Terra, on Mars, and on Venus.
Don said: "Look, fellows, this has gone far enough. We have control again, and a goodly hunk of Terran Electric as well. Enough, I think, to force them to behave like a good little company and stay out of other people's hair. Let's all get together and celebrate." ”

“ They can prearrange their bulling and bearing ahead of time and play smart. With a little luck, they can get the three markets working just so—going up at Northern Landing; down at Terra; and up again at Canalopsis, just like waves in a rope. By playing fast and loose on paper, they can really run things hell, west, and crooked. Illegal, probably, since they each will no doubt claim to have all the stock in their possession, and yet will be able to sell and buy the same stock at the same time in three places."
"Sounds slightly precarious to me," objected Cartright. ”

“ When Kingman expects the market to go down, tell him it's still going up. We'll figure this out as we go along, but he won't like it at all."
There was silence for a few minutes, and then Don said: "Walt, Kingman's sent a message through the Northern Landing station now. He says: 'Dump a block to shake the suckers loose. This is pyramided so high that they should all climb on the sell-wagon; running the market down of their own weight. When it hits a new low, we'll buy, and this time end up by having control.' When he starts to run the market down, you buy at Terra." ”

“ Gradually, he was burning share after share out of uninterested hands, by his depredations. Soon he would have enough stock in Interplanetary to stage a grand show, and then he could swing the thing his way.
His worry was not with this affair.
He gloated over that. His belief that he could beat the Venus Equilateral crowd if he fought them on his ground with his weapon was being corroborated. That, plus the fact that he was using some of Venus Equilateral's own thunder to do the job, was giving him to think that it was but a matter of time. ”

“ The idea of detecting driver radiation is as old as the hills. If any culture had uncovered driver-beam transmission, we'd all have been aware of it. So far as I know, we, and the Terran Electric crowd are the only ones who have had any kind of an opportunity of working with this sub-etheric energy. Wes, have you another miniature of the relay tube handy? ”

“ Power they got—but the ozone they can't take; it's poisonous like a nice dose of chlorine. Poor Terran Electric!"
Mark Kingman sat in the control room of a ship of space, and worried. Below the dome, Venus covered three quarters of the sky, and it circled slowly as the Terran Electric ship oscillated gently up and down.
Before Kingman, on the desk, were pages of stock market reports. On a blackboard, a jagged line denoted the vacillation of Interplanetary Communications, Preferred. This phase of his plan was working to perfection. ”

“ That terrible moaning-stuff he's been complaining about makes him turn the thing off as soon as the day's market is off. He—and the rest of that crew—can't stand it. You'll have to wait until tomorrow's market opens before he'll be listening."
"O.K.," said the operator, and the set went silent.
"Kingman!" said Don Channing in a low, hard voice. "So he's the bright guy behind this. I get it now. Somehow he discovered a detector, and he's been playing the market by getting the quotations by sub-etheric transmission at C2 and beating the Northern Landing market. ”

“ Don smiled in a thoughtful fashion. "It doesn't look so bad right now. Some gang of stock market cutthroats have been playing football with Interplanetary Communications, and Cartright says he is sure that they want control. It's bad; he's been clipped a couple of hard licks, but we're still pitching. The thing I'm wondering right now is this: Shall we toss this possibility of person-to-person and ship-to-ship just at the right turn of the market to bollix up their machinations, or shall we keep it to ourselves and start up another company with this as our basis?" ”

“ The beam from Terra was silent, save for a few items of interest not connected with the market. Kingman's men were given the latest news, baseball scores, and so forth, among which items was another message to Channing from the solar beam project engineer, Addison. They had about given up. Nothing they could do would prevent the formation of ozone by the ton as they drew power by the kilowatt from Sol.
On Venus Equilateral, Channing said: "Ask Charley what his radio frequency is."
Ten minutes later, at the speed of light, the ship beam reached the Relay Girl and the message clicked out. ”

“ Look, Bill, why don't we set one of our Terran agents to tinkering too? Get one of our best men to try to outguess the market. As long as it is being done systematically, he should be able to follow the other guy's thinking. That's the best we can do unless we go gestapo and start listening in on all the stuff that goes through the Station here. ”

“ We've got the detector working to the point where Freddy has taken the Relay Girl out for a run around the Station at about five hundred miles and Wes is still getting responses!"
"Is he? How can he know?"
"Charley rigged the Relay Girl's drivers up with a voice modulator, and Freddy is jerking his head off because the acceleration is directly proportional to the amplitude of his voice, saying: 'One, two, three, four, test.' Don, have you ever wondered why an engineer can't count above four?"
"Walt, does it take a lot of soup to modulate a driver?" asked Arden. ”

“ As a matter of interest, Channing had his roast knolla that evening, so he must have convinced Arden.
Walt said: "And then there were three. Christine, has our little pre-dinner talk disturbed your appetite?"
"Not in the least," said the girl stoutly. "I wouldn't care whether it was knolla or pussy cat. I've been on Mars so long that either one of the little felines is alien to me. What have you to offer?"
"We'll hit Joe's for dinner, which is the best bar in sixty million miles today. ”

“ Yeah, but we've got the only detector for driver radiation in this part of the universe! I'm not going to have it wrecked by a screwball engineer who doesn't give a care what's going on as long as he can tinker with something new and different. ”

“ I don't care a hoot about the control circuit it breaks; those contacts are set, somehow, so that we can detect driver radiation, and I'm not taking any chances of having it ruined."
"Can't you turn the gain down, at least?"
"Nope. We'd miss the gang at Luna."
The speaker spoke in that faint, flat-toned human voice again. It was easy to see that all that gain was necessary to back up the obviously faint response of Kingman's detector. The speaker said: "Kingman! Addison got power through the Channing Layer!" ”

“ It is more than possible that some guy with money and the desire might be able to hook a large slice of V.E. Preferred. I don't think they could get control, but they could garner a plurality from stock outstanding on the planets. Most of the preferred stuff is in the possession of the folks out here, you know, but aside from yourself, Walt, and a couple of dozen of the executive personnel, the stock is spread pretty thin. The common stock has a lot of itself running around loose Outside. ”

“ Mirrors, or adding machines? You can't make an audio amplifier of a three million gain."
"I know it—at least not a practical one. But, we can probably use our audio modulator to modulate a radio frequency, and then modulate the driver with the RF. Then we hang a receiver on to the detector gadget here, and collect RF, modulated, just like a standard radio transmission, and amplify it at RF, convert it to IF, and detect it to AF. Catch?" ”

“ Then the thing dropped a few points, and I tried to take a bit of profit, so that we could go on bolstering the market. They grabbed off my stock, and then, just like that! the market was on the way up again and I couldn't find more than a few odd shares to buy back."
"Don't worry," said Channing, "I don't think anybody is big enough to really damage us. Someone is playing fast and loose, making a killing. ”

“ From there into the next tube, with the high resistance load, and out of the power-putter-outer tube across the desk to the next four-bottle stage."
"That's getting complicated," said Walt. "Four tubes per stage of amplification."
"Sure. As the arts and sciences get more advanced, things tend to get more complicated."
"That's essentially correct," agreed Walt with a smile. "But you're foreguessing. We haven't even got a detector that will detect driver radiation." ”

“ A brush makes contact with the edge of the disk and the axle makes the center connection. Apparently this stuff passes on a direct line right through the metal, for it works."
"Have you tried any kind of tube amplification?" asked Don.
"Not yet. Shall we?"
"Why not? I can still think that the relay tube will amplify if we hook up the input and output loads correctly."
"I've got a tube already hooked up," said Walt. "It's mounted in a panel with the proper voltage supplies and so on. If your resistance calculation is correct, we should get about three thousand voltage gain out of it." ”

“ Because we've been tinkering with driver tubes for years and years—and we have also been gadgeting up detectors, radio hootnannies, and stuff of the electronic spectrum all the way from direct current to hard X rays, and we have yet to have anything react to driver radiation. ”

“ You couldn't talk from one end of Venus Equilateral to the other with a set like that."
"No, I guess you're right. Hey! Look!"
The meter took a sudden upswing, danced for a minute, and died once more.
"What have you got in there? What did you change?"
"Oh, I got foolish and tried a tuned circuit across the output of one of the miniature transmission tubes. It's far enough away from the big beams and stuff at the North end so that none of the leakage can cause trouble. ”

“ The business aspects and all are under the control of men who know what they're fighting. We hire business men, just like business men hire engineers, and for the opposite purpose. You're the best we could get, you know that. If those guys get Venus Equilateral, they'll get you too. ”

“ It was Walt Franks.
"Don," he said with a laugh in his voice, though it was apparent that he felt slightly guilty about laughing, "got a 'gram from Addison, the project engineer on the solar beam from Terran Electric. Says: 'Finally got through Channing Layer. Power by the megawatt-hour in great shape. But the atmosphere from the Channing Layer right down to the snout of the tube is a dull red scintillation. Something like the driver-tube trail—but it ionizes the atmosphere into ozone. Power by the megawatt, and ozone by the megaton." ”

“ Cartright began to run off the many yards of ticker tape. "Here, some guy dumped a boatload at Canalopsis, and some other guy glommed on to a large hunk at New York. The Northern Landing Exchange showed a bit of irregularity during the couple of hours of tinkering, and the irregularity was increased because some bright guy took advantage of it and sold short." ”

“ Then the picture and the tickers catch up with one another, and Joe will start buying again at sixty-five, whilst Pete and Jimmy are selling at seventy-one. Once they get their periodicity running, they're able to tinker the market for quite a time. ”

“ Sure, if it's needed. I'd prefer Interplanetary Transport if they'll do business with us. We've been in the way of helping them out a couple of million dollar losses; they might be anxious to reciprocate. ”

“ We can pack the juice on in the amplifier and see, now that we have it tuned on the button," said Walt.
"It won't," said Wes. "I've been all across the dial of the alloy disk. Nothing at all."
"O.K. Well, so what if it doesn't. We've still got us a ship-to-ship communications system. Hey! What was that?"
That was a pale, flat-sounding human voice saying: "Kingman! I. C. Pfd. has been at six hundred and nine for two days, now. What's our next move?"
"Kingman!" exploded Channing. "Why, the ... the—"
"Careful," warned Arden. "There's a lady present." ”