George O. Smith

“ DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE! are not there for appearance."
"Sounds like a threat to me."
"Have I threatened you? It sounds to me as though I were more than anxious for your welfare. Any threat of which you speak is utterly without grounds, and is a figment of your imagination; based upon distrust of the Interplanetary Communications Company, and the personnel of the Venus Equilateral Relay Station."
Kingman shut up. He went down the list, marking off items here and there. While he was marking, Channing scribbled a circuit and listed the parts. He handed it over as Kingman finished. ”

“ The power from the driver comes from the disintegration of the cathode surface—there isn't a ten thousandth of an inch of plating on the inside of the tube to show where it went. But the transmission tube has an input and the tube itself merely transduces this power to some level of radiation for transmission. It is re-transduced again for use. But the thing is this: Your tube is the only thing we know of that will accept subelectronic energy and use it. If the driver and the transmission tubes are similar in operational spectrum, we may be able to detect driver radiation by some modification. ”

“ Our Terran legal department has a direct line there, you know, and they have been directed to maintain that contact at all cost."
"May I use your lines?"
"Certainly. They are public carriers. You will not be restricted any more than any other man. I am certain that our right to transmit company business without waiting for the usual turn will not be contested."
"That sounds like a veiled threat."
"That, sounds like slander!"
"Oh no. Believe me. But wait, Dr. Channing. Is there no way in which we may meet on a common ground?"
"I think so. We want free hand in this tube proposition." ”

“ We are essentially a space-born company, and as such we can have no one at the helm that is not equipped to handle the technical details of operation in space." Channing smiled reminiscently. "We had a so-called efficiency expert running Venus Equilateral a couple of years ago, and the fool nearly wrecked us because he didn't know that the airplant was not a mass of highly complicated, chemical reaction machinery instead of what it really is. Kingman, do you know what an airplant is?" ”

“ We can take a relay tube and put in ten watts, say, across ten thousand ohms. That means the input will be somewhat above three hundred volts. Now, if our output is raced across a hundred thousand ohms, ten watts will give us one thousand volts. So we can get voltage amplification at the expense of current—which we will not need. Unfortunately, the relay tube as well as the rest of the system will give out with the same kind of power that it is impressed with—so we'll have amplification of driver radiation. ”

“ We can make paper-talk even if Brother Kingman won't let us set it to soldering iron. There are a lot of things I want to ask you about the tube."
They sat around a drawing table and Channing began to sketch. "What I'd hoped to do is this," he said, drawing a schematic diagram. "We're not interested in power transmission, but your gadget will do a bit of voltage amplification because of its utter indifference to the power-line problem of impedance matching. ”

“ Over-cooling these two anodes will inhibit the power-intake."
"Right," said Wes. "And I am of the opinion that the power available from Sol is of a magnitude that will permit operation over and above the limit."
"Four million tons of energy per second!" exploded Walt. "That's playing with fire!"
"You bet. We'll fix 'em with that!"
"Our experience with relay tubes," said Farrell slowly, "indicates that some increase in range is possible with additional anode-focusing. Build your tube-top with an extra set of anodes, and that'll give us better control of the beam." ”

“ You know, Kingman, I'm not too sure that Venus Equilateral wants to play around with power except as a maintenance angle. What if we toss the solar beam to the public domain? That is within our right, too."
Kingman's green color returned, this time accompanied with beads of sweat. He turned to Farrell. "Is there nothing we can do? Is this patentable?"
"No—Yes," grinned Farrell.
Kingman excused himself. He went to the office provided for him and began to send messages to the Terran Electric offices at Chicago. ”

“ We held the three inner planets together by the seat of our pants, so to speak, and nurtured communications from a slipshod, hope-to-God-it-gets through proposition to a sure thing. Funny, but when people were taking their messages catch as catch can, there was no reason for legal lights. Now that we can and do insure messages against their loss, we find that we are often tangled up with legal red tape.
"Otherwise, we wouldn't have a lawyer on the premises. They serve their purpose, no doubt, but in this gang, the engineers tell the attorneys how to run things. ”

“ Russell's Mixture—"
"Whoooo said that!" roared Channing.
"Who said what?" asked Barney.
"Why bust our eardrums?" objected Walt.
"What do you mean?" asked Wes, coming to life for the moment.
"Something about Russell's Mixture. Who said that?"
"I did. Why?"
"Look, Wes, what are your cathodes made of?"
"Thorium, C. P. metal. That's why they are shipped in metal containers in a vacuum."
"What happens if you try to use something else?"
"Don't work very well. In fact, if the output cathode and the input dynode are not the same metal, they won't pass power at all." ”

“ Terran Electric's rights shall prevail exclusively—except within the realm of space, upon man-made celestial objects, and upon the satellites and minor natural celestial bodies where stations of the Interplanetary Communications Company are established. ”

“ Everything we do is done according to legal precedent."
"I see. And when there is no precedent?"
"Then we all decide upon the proper course, and establish a precedent."
"But I've got to show you a complete circuit before you'll permit me to go ahead?"
"That's not all. Your program must not include reproducing these tubes either in miniature or full size—or larger. Give me your requirements and I shall request Terran Electric to perform the fabrication—"
"Look, Kingman, Venus Equilateral has facilities to build as good a tube as Terran Electric. ”

“ They can hang a couple of G on a six-hundred foot hull for hours and hours. The radiation they emit must be detectable; don't tell me that such power is not."
"The interplanetary companies have been tinkering with drivers for years and years," said Walt. "They have never detected it?"
"Could be, but there are a couple of facts that I'd like to point out. One is that they're not interested in detection. They only want the best in driver efficiency. Another thing is that the radiation from the drivers is sufficient to ionize atmosphere into a dull red glow that persists for several minutes. ”

“ Barney fiddled with the plate-controls for several minutes. "She's running on dead center alignment, now," he announced.
"Question," put in Wes, "do we get power immediately, or must we wait whilst the beam gets there and returns?"
"You must run your power line before you get power," said Walt. "My money is on the wait."
"Don't crack your anode-coupling circuit until then," warned Wes. "We don't know a thing about this; I'd prefer to let it in easy-like instead of opening the gate and letting the whole four million tons per second come roaring in through this ammeter." ”

“ We shall continue to do so. Therefore you are speaking with the proper parties, and once the contract is prepared by you, we shall have an attorney run through the whereases, wherefores, and parties of the first, second, and third parts to see that there is no sleight of hand in the microscopic type."
"You're taking a chance," warned Kingman. "All men are not as fundamentally honest as Terran Electric."
"Kingman," smiled Channing, "I hate to remind you of this, but who got what just now? We wanted the transmission tube." ”

“ He kept one eye on the line voltmeter and opened the anode-coupler slightly. The meter dipped as Warren shunted the Station load over to the tube circuit. Walt brought the line voltage up to above normal, and it immediately dropped as Warren took more load from the solar intake. This jockeying went on for several minutes until Warren called: "You've got it all. Now what?"
"Start running the bus down here to take the communications load," said Don. "We're running off of an eight hundred thousand mile cathode now, and his power output is terrific. ”

“ We could possibly modulate the in-phase anode with anything we wanted, and there would be enough junk floating around in the photosphere to slam on through."
"Maybe it is that lack of selectivity that licks us now," said Don. "Run the voltage up and down a bit. There should be D.C. running around in Sol, too."
"Whatever this power-level is running at," said Barney, "we may get in-phase voltage—or in-phase power by running a line from the power terminal back. Move over, boys, I'm going to hang a test clip in here." ”

“ I am a lawyer, not an engineer. Mr. Farrell will take care of the technical aspects of the device."
"And in looking out for your interests, what will you require?"
"Daily reports from your group. Daily conferences with your legal department. These reports should be prepared prior to the day's work so that I may discuss with the legal department the right of Terran Electric to permit or to disapprove the acts."
"You understand that there may be a lot of times when something discovered at ten o'clock may change the entire program by ten oh six?" ”

“ It takes one tower every hundred and seventy miles, and the only restriction on tower height is that the tube must be above ground by ten to one the distance that could be flashed over under high intensity ultraviolet light. ”

“ Well, high-tension juice will flash over better under ultraviolet illumination. The tube must be high enough to exceed this distance by ten to one at the operating voltage of the stuff down the line. Another thing, the darned beam can be made to curve by adjusting the beam plates in the tube. The boys in the Palanortis Jungles say they're a godsend, since there are a lot of places where the high-tension towers would be impossible since the Palanortis Whitewood grows about a thousand feet tall. ”

“ Walt turned to the rest. "If any of us can sleep," he said, "I'd suggest it. Something tells me that tomorrow is going to be one of those days that mother told me about. I'll buy a drink."
Walt opened the anode-coupler circuit, and the needle of the output ammeter slammed across the scale and wound the needle halfway around the stop pin. The shunt, which was an external, high-dissipation job, turned red, burned the paint off of its radiator fins, and then proceeded to melt. ”

“ Meanwhile, we've got a healthy cable from the generator room; we can run the noncommunicating drain of the Station from our plaything here. That should give us an idea. We can use a couple of million watts right there. If this gadget will handle it, we can make one that will take the whole load without groaning. I'm calling Jim right now. He can start taking the load over from the generators as we increase our intake. We'll fade, but not without a flicker."
Walt hooked the output terminals of the tube to the huge cable blocks, using sections of the same heavy cable. ”

“ He was allergic to good engineering, anyway."
"That may be good enough in space," said Kingman, "but on Terra, we feel that our engineers are not equipped to dabble in the legal tangles that follow when they force us to establish precedent by inventing something that has never been covered by a previous decision."
"O.K.," said Don. "Every man to his own scope. ”

“ Barney pulled out a pencil. "If you make that automatic-coupling circuit dependent upon the output from the terminal ends," he said, "it will accept only the amount of input that is required by the power being used from the output. ”

“ Walt was trying voltage-variations on the supply-anodes in a desultory manner; Barney was measuring the electrode spacing with a huge vernier rule, and Wes was staring at the sun, dimmed to seeable brightness by a set of dark glasses.
Wes was muttering to himself. "Electrode-voltages, O.K. ... alignment perfect ... solar power output ... not like power-line electricity ... solar composition ... ”