Astounding Science Fiction (UK Edition) — page 23: what you’re looking at

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

BEAM PIRATE 21 “So am I,” insisted Christine. “That’s out,” said Jim. “I know what he’s talking about.” ‘So do I,” said Arden. “Don’t do it.” “Well, what better have you to offer?” ““You and I are going down to the Mall.” Channing groaned in mock anguish. “Here goes another closet full of female haberdashery. I’m going to close that corri- dor some day, or put a ceiling on the quantity of sales, or make it illegal to sell a woman anything unless she can prove that ‘she has nothing to wear!’” “That, I’d like to see,” said Walt. “You would,” snorted Arden. “Come on, Chris. Better than the best of three worlds is available.” “That sort of leaves me all alone,” said Don. “I’m going to look up Wes Farrell and see if he’s been able to make anything worth looking at for a driver detector.” Don found Wes in the laboratory, por- ing over a complicated circuit. Farrell was muttering under his -breath, and probing deep into the maze of haywire on the bench. “Wes, when you get to talking to your- self, it’s time to take a jaunt to Joe’s.” “Not right now,” objected Wes. “I haven’t got that hollow leg that your gang seem to have developed. Besides, I’m on the trail of something.” “Yes?” Channing forgot about Joe’s, and was all interest. “I got a wiggle out of the meter there a few minutes ago. I'm trying to get another one.” : “What was it like?” ““Wavered up and down like fierce for about a minute after I turned it on. Then it died quick, and has been dead ever since.” “Could it have been anything cockeyed with the instruments?” “Nope. I’ve checked every part in this circuit, and everything is as good as it ever will be. No, something external caused that response.” ““You’ve tried the solar tube with a dynode of the same alloy as the driver cathodes?” “Uh-huh. Nothing at all. Oh, I'll take that back. I got a scratch. With a pre-meter gain of about four hundred decibels, I read three micromicroamperes. That was de- tected from a driver tube forty feet across the room, running at full output. I wondered for a minute whether the opposing driver was doing any cancellation, and so I took a chance and killed it for about a half second, but that wasn’t it.” “Nuts. Does the stuff attenuate with dis- tance?” ‘“‘As best as I could measure, it was some- thing to the tune of inversely proportional to the cube root of the distance. That’s normal for beams of a not-too-tight nature and it shows that the stuff isn’t glo- bularly radiated. But the amplifier gain was hanging right on the limit of possible am- plification, and the meter was as sensitive as a meter can be made, I think. 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. Besides, I’m not getting any- thing like our beam transmissions.” Channing laughed. “Uh-huh, looks to me like you’re not getting much of anything at all.” Farrell smiled wryly. “Yeah, that’s so,” he agreed. “But look, Don, Hertz himself didn’t collect a transcontinental short-wave broadcast on his first attempt.” “If Hertz had been forced to rely upon vacuum tubes, his theories couldn’t have been formulated, I think,” said Channing. “At least, not by him. The easier frequen- cies and wave lengths are too long; a five hundred meter dipole can’t be set up in a small room for laboratory tinkering. The kind of frequencies that come of dipoles a couple of feet long, such as Hertz used, are pretty hard to work with unless you have special tubes.” “Hertz had rotten detectors, too. But he made his experiments with spark-gap generators, which gave sufficient high-peak transients to induce spark-magnitude vol- tages in his receiving dipole.” “I’m not too certain of that tuned-circuit idea of yours, Wes. Go ahead and tinker to your heart’s content, but remember that I’m_ skeptical of the standard resonance idea.” “Why?” ot “Because we've been tinkering with driver tubes for years and years—and we have also been gadgeting up detectors, radio hoot-nannies, and stuff of the electronic comiclooks.c©