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
connected 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 delivered exactly fourteen minutes before the ticker projection on
the grand wall of the 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 roaring, 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."
"I can't. I'm not brilliant enough to devise 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," objected 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?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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