Astounding Science Fiction (UK Edition) — page 24: what you’re looking at

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

22 spectrum all the way from direct current to hard X rays, and we have yet to have anything react to driver radiation. Ergo, ~ I’m skeptical.” The call bell rang for Channing, and he answered. 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 at- mosphere 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.” “Ozone, hey? Lots of it?” “Plenty, according to the rest of this. It looks to me like a sort of ‘denatured’ power system. There it is, all nice and potent, cheap, and unlicensed. But the second swal- low going down meets the first one on the way back. 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 per- fection. 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. And, he laughed, the poor fools were not aware of their peril. Oh, some bird was trying to buck him, but he was not prepared as Kingman was, nor had he the source of information that Kingman had. Ne, the thing that werried him was— ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION And there it came again! A wild, caco- phonous wailing, like a whole orchestra of instruments playing at random, in random keys. It shook the -very roots of the body, that terrible caterwauling, and not only did it shake the body, and the mind, but it actually caused loose plates to rattle in the bulkhead, and the cabinet doors followed in unison. The diapason stop was out for noon, and the racket filled the small control room and bounced back and forth, dinning at the ears of Kingman as it went echoing by. It penetrated to. the upper reaches of the ship, and the crew gritted their teeth and cursed the necessity of being able to hear orders, for cotton plugs would have been a godsend and a curse simultaneously. Anything that would blot that racket out would also deafen them to the vital orders necessary to the operation of the ship in this precarious poising maneuver. Two hundred sheer watts of undistorted audio power boomed forth in that tiny room—two hundred watts of pure, undis- torted power to racket forth something that probably started out as sheer distortion. And yet— Faintly striving against that fearful racket there came a piping, flat-sounding human voice that said: “Kingman! LC. Preferred just hit eighty-nine!” Kingman scowled and punched on the intership teletype machine. Using the com- municator set with that racket would have been impossible. The radio man read the note that appeared on his ’type, and smiled grimly. He saw to his helio-mirror and sighted through a fine telescope at a spot on Venus, three thousand miles below. The helio began to send its flashing signal to this isolated spot near the Boiling River, and it was read, acknowledged, and repeated for safety’s sake. The radio man flashed “O.K.” and went back to his forty-seventh game of chess with the assistant pilot. The helio man on the Boiling River read the message, grinned, and stepped to the telephone. He called a number at Northern Landing, and a tight beam sped across the Northern quarter of Venus to a man con- nected with the Venus Stock Market. The man nodded, and said to another: “Buy fifteen hundred—use the name of Ralph Gantry this time.” The stock purchased under the name of Ralph Gantry was signed, sealed, and de- livered exactly fourteen minutes before the ticker projection on the grand wall ef the Ccomiclbooks.c©