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Beam Pirate
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Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #67998.
The opening · free to read
Illustrated by Alfred
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science-Fiction, October 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Mark Kingman was in a fine state of nerves. He looked upon life and the people in it as one views the dark-brown taste of a hangover. It seemed to him at the present time that the Lord had forsaken him, for the entire and complete success of the solar beam had been left only to Venus Equilateral by a sheer fluke of nature. Certainly he, nor anyone else, could have foreseen the Channing Layer, that effectively blocked any attempt to pierce it with the strange, sub-level energy spectrum over which the driver tube and the power-transmission tube worked, representing the extremes of the so-called spectrum.
But Venus Equilateral, for their part, were well set. Ships plied the spaceways using their self-contained power only during atmospheric passage, and paid Venus Equilateral well for the privilege. The Relay Station itself was powered on the solar beam, and the costly shipments of potential power had been stopped. There were other relay stations that belonged to the communications company; Luna, Deimos and Phobos, and the six that circled Venus in lieu of a satellite; all were powered by the solar beam. And the solar observatory on Mercury used but little power, so the needs of the observatory became the sole income for Terran Electric's planetary rights of the solar beam, since Mercury owned no air of its own.
Mark Kingman was beginning to feel the brunt of Channing's statement to the effect that legal-minded men were of little importance when it came to the technical life in space, where men's lives and livelihood depended more on technical skill than upon the legal pattern set for their protection in the complex society of planetary civilization.
It seemed that way. For instead of gaining their ends by legal restrictions on the power-transmission tube investigations, Terran Electric had lost their chance. Venus Equilateral had the legal right to tinker with the transmission tubes all they wanted to, and in return, Terran Electric held all of the planetary rights to Venus Equilateral's solar beam--which in the domain covered by natural celestial bodies was about as valuable as the gold-mining rights to the crater Tycho.
And everyone knows that Luna, as a valuable piece of real estate, is useful only to Venus Equilateral as a place to plant the Lunar Relay Station that handled the Terran Beam and punched downward at the Heaviside Layer. Luna's valuable assets as to mineral rights consisted of a bit of talc--no longer used because of plastic engineering--and pumice--no longer used because of synthetic engineering.
And Kingman knew that only if Terra were not abundant in granite would the Lunar granite come in handy as a source of tombstones; and that made him writhe because when he thought of tombstones he also thought of his position with Terran Electric, which had been endangered because of his own legal connivances.
He swore vengeance.
So, like the man who doggedly makes the same mistake twice in a row, Kingman was going to move Heaven, Hell, and the three planets in an effort to take a swing at the same jaw that had caught his fist between its teeth before.
Out through the window of his office, he saw men toiling with the big tube of the far roof; the self-same tube that had carried the terrific load of Venus Equilateral for ten days without interruption and with no apparent overload. Here on Terra, its output meter, operating through a dummy load, showed not the slightest inclination to leave the bottom peg and seek a home among the higher brackets.
The Channing Layer barred the passage of radiation of this so-called sub-etheric energy as effectively as the Heaviside Layer had blocked Interplanetary Communications for many, many years.
So Kingman cursed and hated himself for having backed himself into trouble. But Kingman was not a complete fool. He was a brilliant attorney, and his record had placed him in the position of Assistant Chief Attorney for Terran Electric, which was a place of no mean importance. He had been licked on the other fellow's ground, with the other fellow's tools.
He picked up papers that carried, side by side, the relative assets of Venus Equilateral and Terran Electric. He studied them and thought deeply.
To his scrutiny, the figures, seemed about equal, though perhaps the Interplanetary Communications Co. was a bit ahead.
But--he had been licked on the other fellow's ground with the other fellow's tools; he thought that if he fought on his own ground, with his own tools, he might be able to swing the deal.
And Terran Electric was not without a modicum of experience in the tools of the other fellow. His engineering department was brilliant and efficient, too; at least the equal of Channing and Franks and their gang of laughing gadgeteers. That not only gave him the edge of having his own tools and his own ground, but a bit of the other fellow's instruments too. Certainly his engineering department should be able to think of something good.
William Cartright, business manager for Venus Equilateral, interrupted Don and Walt in a discussion. He carried a page of stock market quotations and a few hundred feet of ticker tape.
Channing put down his pencil and leaned back in his chair. Walt did likewise, and said: "What's brewing?"
"Something I do not like."
"So?"
"The stock has been cutting didoes. We've been up and down so much it looks like a scenic railway."
"How do we come out?"
"Even, mostly; but from my experience, I would say that some bird is playing hooky with Venus Equilateral, Preferred. The common is even worse."
"Look bad?"
"Not too good. 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. Look!"
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." He reeled off a few yards and then said: "Next, we have the opposite tale. 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."
"That's so," agreed Don. "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."
"Would that help?"
"Yeah, but we'd all land in the hoosegow for breaking the secrecy legislation. You know. 'No one shall ... intercept ... transmit ... eavesdrop upon ... any message not intended for the listener, and ... shall not ... be party to the use of any information gained ... et cetera.' That's us. The trouble is this lag between the worlds. 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.
"Not at all, if you figure things just right. At a given instant, Pete may be buying at sixty-five on Venus; Joe may be selling like furious at seventy-one on Mars; and Jimmy may be bucking him up again by buying at sixty-five on Terra. 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. That's where your man comes in, Bill. Have him study the market and step in at the right time and grab us all a few cheap ones. Get me?"
"Sure," said Cartright. "I get it. In that way, we'll tend to stabilize the market, as well as getting the other guy's shares."
"Right. I'll leave it up to you. Handle this thing for the best interests of all of us."
Cartright smiled once again, and left with a thoughtful expression on his face. Channing picked up the miniature of the power-transmission tube and studied it as though the interruption had not occurred. "We'll have to use about four of these per stage," he said. "We'll have to use an input-terminal tube to accept the stuff from the previous stage, drop it across the low-resistance load, resistance couple the stage to another output terminal tube where we can make use of the coupling circuits without feedback. 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."
"I know, and perhaps this thing will not work. But after all, we've got the tubes and we might as well think them out just in case. We'll detect driver radiation soon enough, and then we might as well have a few odd thoughts on how to amplify it for public use. Nothing would tickle me more than to increase those three circles on our letterhead to four. 'Planet to Planet, and Ship to Ship' is our hope. This one-way business is not to my liking. How much easier it would have been if I'd been able to squirt a call in to the Station when I was floating out there beyond Jove in that wrecked ship. That gave me to think, Walt. Driver-radiation detection is the answer."
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