Astounding Science Fiction (UK Edition) — page 25: what you’re looking at

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

BEAM PIRATE Exchange showed the I.C. Preferred stock turn the bottom curve and start upward by hitting Eighty-nine! Back in the Terran Electric spaceship, Kingman’s ears were still beset by the roar- ing, alien music. He was sitting in his chair with his head between his hands, and did not see the man approaching the instrument panel with a pair of side-cutters in one hand. The man reached the panel, lifted it slightly, and reached forward. Then Kingman, hearing a slight imperfection in the wail of the speaker, looked up, jumped from his chair, and tackled the engineer. “You blasted fool!” blazed Kingman. “You idiot!” The music stopped at his third word, and the scream of his voice in the silence of the room almost scared Kingman himself. “Mark, I’m going nuts. I can’t stand that racket.” “You're going to stand it. Unless you can get something to cut it out.” “T can’t. I'm not brilliant enough to de- vise a circuit that will cut that noise and still permit the entry of your fellow on Luna.” “Then you'll live with it.” “Mark, why can’t we take that relay apart and work on it?” “Ben, as far as I know, that relay is what Channing and his gang would give their whole Station for—and will, soon enough. I don’t care how it works—or why.” “That’s no way to make progress,” jected Ben. “Yeah, but we’ve got the only detector for driver radiation in this part of the universe! I’m not going to have it wrecked by a screwball engineer who doesn’t give a care what’s going on as long as he can tinker with something new and different. What do we know about it? Nothing. Therefore how can you learn anything about it? What would you look for? What would you expect to find? “But where is that music coming from?” “T don’t know. As best as we.can calcu- late, driver radiation propagates at the square of the speed of light, and that gives us a twenty-four minute edge on Venus Equilateral at the present time. For all I know, that music may be coming from the other end of the galaxy. At the square of the speed of light, you could talk to Cen- tauri and get an answer in not too long.” “But if we had a chance to tinker with that relay, we might be able to find out ob- 23 what tunes it and then we can tune in the Lunar station and tune out that cat- melody.” “T’m running this show—and this relay is going to stay right where it is. I don't care a hoot about the control circuit it breaks; those contacts are set, somehow, so that we can detect driver radiation, and I’m not taking any chances of having it ruined.” “Can’t you turn the gain down, at least?” “Nope. We’d miss the gang at Luna.” The speaker spoke in that faint, flat- toned human voice again. It was easy to see that all that gain was necessary to back up the obviously faint response of King- man’s detector. The speaker said: “King- man! Addison got power through the Channing Layer!” That was all for about an hour. Mean- while, the mewling tones burst forth again and again, assaulting the ears with intent to do damage. The messages were terse and for the most part, interesting. They gave the market reports; they intercepted the beam transmissions through the Terran Heaviside Layer before they got through the Lunar Relay Station, inspected the swiftly- moving tape and transmitted the juicy mor- sels to Kingman via the big driver tube that stood poised outside of the landed spaceship. Kingman enjoyed an hour of celebration at Addison’s success, and then the joy turned to bitter hate as the message came through telling of the ozone that resulted in the passage of the solar beam through the atmosphere. The success of the beam, and the utter impossibility of using it were far worse than the original fact of the beam’s failure to pass the Channing Layer. So Kingman went back to his stock market machinations, and applied himself diligently. And as the days wore on, King- man’s group manipulated their watered stock and ran the price up and down at will, and after each cycle Kingman’s outfit owned just one bit more of Venus Equila- teral. Terran Electric would emerge frem this battle with Interplanetary Communications- as a subsidiary—with Kingman at the helm! Walt Franks entered Channing’s office with a wild-eyed look on his face. “Don! Oe a “Huh? What are you driving about?” “C2, The speed of light, squared |” “Fast—but what is it?” “The solar beam! It propagates at C2!” comiclooks CO