Astounding Science Fiction (UK Edition) — page 19: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

EAM PIRATE By GEORGE O. SMITH Lawyer Kingman made a bad mistake when he tried out- smarting engineers on engineering. He made a different deal, though, in trying to out-communicate the communica- tion experts of Venus Equilateral! MARK KINGMAN was in a fine state of nerves. He looked upon lite and the people in it as one views the dark-brown taste of a hang- over. It seemed to him at the present time that the Lord had forsaken him, tor 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 atmo- spheric 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 sattelite; 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 import- ance when it came to the technical life in space, where men’s lives and livelihood de- pended 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 Equi- lateral had the legal right to tinker with the transmission tubes all they wanted to, and in return, Terran Electric held all of the plane- tary 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 valu- able 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 Heavi- side 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 be- cause 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 on the far roof; the selfsame 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. 7 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 17 comiclooks.€c©