Astounding Science Fiction (UK Edition) — page 26: what you’re looking at

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

24 “Oh, now look Nothing can travel that fast!” “Maybe this isn’t something!” “It has energy, energy has mass, mass cannot travel faster than the limiting speed of light.” ; “O.K. It can’t do it. But unless my measurements are all haywire, the beam gets to Sol and back at C2. I can prove it.” “Yeah? How? You couldn’t possibly measure an interval so small as two times sixty-seven million miles—the radius of Venus’ orbit—traversed at the speed of light squared.” “No. I admit that. But, Don, I got power out of Sirius!” “You WHAT?” yelled Channing. “Got power out of Sirius. And unless I can’t use a micro-clock, it figured out from here to Sirius and back with the bacon in just about ninety-three percent of the speed of light, squared. Seven percent is well within the experimental error, I think, since we think of Sirius as being eight and one half light-years away. That’s probably not too accurate as a matter of fact, but it’s the figure I used. But here we are. Power from Sirius at C2. Thirty-five billion miles per second! This stuff doesn’t care how many laws it breaks!” “Hm-m-m. C?, hey? Oh, lovely. Look, Walt, let’s run up and take a whirl at Wes Farrell’s detector. I'm beginning to envision person-to-person service, ship-to-ship ser- vice, and possibly the first Interplanet Net- work. Imagine hearing a play-by-play de- scription of the Interplanetary Series!”’ “Wool-gathering,” snorted Walt. “We’ve gotta catch our detector first!” “Wes has something. First glimmer we’ve had. I think this is the time to rush into it with all feet and start pushing!” “O.K. Who do we want?” “Same gang as u-ual. Charley and Freddy Thomas, Walton, Jim Warren, Wes Farrell, of course, and you can get Jim Baler into it too. No, Walt, Christine Baler is not the kind of people who haul into a screwdriver meeting.” “IT was merely thinking.” “IT know. But you’re needed, and if she were around, you’d be a total loss as far as cerebration.” “T like her.” “So does Barney Carroll.” “Um. Hadn’t thought of that one. O.K.., no Christine in our conference. I'll have Jeanne call the screwballs on the communi- ator.” ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION They dribbled into Farrell’s laboratory one by one, and then Don said: “We have a detector. It is about as efficient as a slab of marble; only more so. We can get a tinkle of about ten micro- microamps at twenty feet distance from a driver tube using eight KVA input, which if we rate this..in the usual spaceship efficiency, comes to about one-half G. That’s about standard, for driver tubes, since they run four to a ship at 2-G total. ““Now, that is peanuts. We should be able to wind a megammeter around the peg at twenty feet. Why the red ironization comes out of the tube and hits our so-called de- tector, and the amount of ozone it creates is terrific. Yet we can’t get a good reading out of it.” | Walt asked: finally?” “A four-turn coil on a ceramic form, in series with a twenty micromicrofarad tuning condenser. I’ve been using a circular plate as a collector.” “Does it tune?” “Nope. Funny thing, though, it won’t work without a condenser in the circuit. I can use anything at all there without tuning it. But, darn it, the coil is the only one that works.” “That’s slightly ridiculous. Have you re- constructed all factors?” , “Inductance, distributed capacity, and factor ‘Q’ are all right on the button with two more I made. Nothing dioding.” “Hm-m-m. This takes the cake. Nothing works, you say?” “Nothing in my mind. I’ve tried about three hundred similar coils, and not a wiggle since. That’s the only one.” Charley Thomas said: “Wes, have you tried your tube-amplifier system ahead of it?” “Yes, and nothing at all happens then. I don’t understand that one, because we know that any kind of input power will be te-beamed as similar power. I should think that the thing would amplify the same kind of stuff. I’ve used a solar beam miniature with a driver-alloy dynode in it, but that doesn’t work either.” ; -“Shucks,” said Charley. Don stood up and picked up the coil. “Fellows, I’m going to make a grand, old college try!” “Yes?” asked Walt. “T’ve got a grand idea, here. One, I’m still remembering that business of making the receptor dynode of the same alloy as comiclooks “Wes, what worked, (©)