A Cosmic Christmas Read online

  “And in the meantime?” asked Christine.

  “In the meantime, we measure the electrical constants to within an inch of their lives,” he told her. “I’ve got a couple of real fancy meters here—this one that I’m hooking across the original wattmeter in the circuit measures the wattages in the region between one hundred thousand kilowatts and one hundred ten thousand kilowatts. Designed especially as a high-level meter.”

  Walt clipped the portable meters in place and made recordings. Finally he nodded. “Right on the button,” he said. “Just what the meters should read.”

  The crystal began to vibrate faintly, and Walt mentioned that either Wes Farrell was calling Freddie Thomas or vice versa. “Can’t hear it very well,” complained Walt, “because Wes has the amplifiers downstairs, both incoming amplifiers from the dynamic pickup—we had to give up the standard crystal because it is expected to get cold enough to make the crystal too brittle—to the modulating equipment. The monitor speaker is outside—we haven’t been in here enough to make use of it since our first tries.”

  Walt took a look at the bridge on the thermocouple and nodded vaguely. He killed more time by showing Christine the huge tube that drained the latent heat out of the room and hurled it across the Solar System to Pluto.

  “Y’know,” he grinned as a thought struck him. “I think we’ve licked the Channing Layer that so neatly foiled Mark Kingman and Terran Electric on that solar power project.”

  “Yes?”

  “Sure,” he said. “All we do is set up a real beam input device on the moon, for instance, and then use a batch of these things to draw the power from there.”

  “But how about the formation of ozone?”

  “That’ll have to be checked,” said Walt. “For Pluto hasn’t got a Channing Layer, of course, and our station out there is no criterion. But you note there is no smell of ozone in here. That leads me to think that we’ve given Terran Electric the runaround once more. Funny thing about Kingman. If someone gave him this development, he’d never think of reversing it to bring energy in.”

  “From what I know of the man,” said Christine, “he’d not think of reversing, but he would think of perverting.”

  “Christine!” Walt shouted.

  “Huh?” asked the bewildered girl.

  “You may have had your thought for the week!”

  Walt tried a bit of Indian war dance, but failed because the pseudogravitic force was too light to hold him down. They were too close to the axis for full force.

  “But I don’t understand.”

  Walt laughed hugely and hugged her. Christine was lissome in the curve of his arm as she relaxed against him.

  Walt looked down at her for what seemed to be a long time, while the stream of highly technical thinking and deduction gave way to a series of more fundamental thoughts. Then he added his other arm to the embrace, and Christine turned to face him. He kissed her gently, experimentally—and discovered, instead of resistance, there was cooperation. His kiss became fervent and Christine’s lips parted beneath his.

  Some minutes later, Christine leaned back in his arms and smiled at him affectionately. “I was wondering if you’d ever get around to that,” she said softly.

  Walt grinned. “Have I been had?”

  “I had Jim pack the all-white shotgun,” she told him.

  “Shucks, why not just have him threaten to sit on me?” asked Walt. He kissed her again.

  “Now,” she said, after an appropriate and pleasant interval, “just what was my ‘thought for the week’?”

  “Kingman,” he said, his forehead creasing in a frown.

  “Kingman?”

  “We’ve no corner on brains,” said Walt. “Anybody tinkering with these energy tubes might easily devise the same thing. Kingman’s immediate thought would be to freeze us out, I betcha.”

  Walt kissed her again and then let her go. “Let’s do some juggling with figures,” he said.

  “What kind of?”

  “The Laws of Probability, aided by a bit of sheer guesswork and some shrewd evaluation of the barrister’s mind.”

  Christine smiled. “You can speak plainer than that,” she said.

  “I know,” he replied, reaching for his bag of gear, “but there’s a lady present.”

  “You forget that the lady thought of it,” Christine pointed out. “So let’s go and find the—barrister.”

  “It ought to show, though,” observed Walt. “And yet, my lady, we can check whether there has been cross-duggery at the skullroads by making a brief observation along here somewhere.”

  “How?”

  “Well, about fifty yards up this corridor there is a wall thermostat.”

  “You think that if Kingman were trying to chill off the place, he’d have bollixed the thermostats so they can’t heat up the place and compensate?”

  Walt nodded. “He’d do it, not knowing that we had all the nearby circuits shut off for our own experiment, no doubt.”

  “You don’t suppose Kingman knew about this idea and decided to add to the general effect?” asked Christine.

  Walt shook his head. “He would assume that someone would be rambling up here, off and on, to look at the works. He’d automatically choose another place if he thought we had this one under observation.”

  Walt stopped at the thermostat, and with a screwdriver he removed the face of the instrument. He reached down into his tool pocket and took out a long, slender pair of tweezers. He probed in the depths of the thermostat and came out with a tiny square of paper.

  He held it up for Christine to see.

  “Stickum on one side held it until the contacts closed,” he said. “Then it made a damned good insulator. Betcha this slip of paper came from Terran Electric!”

  “Now what?” Christine asked.

  “I’m going to call Don,” said Walt, “Iffen and providen we can find a live jack.”

  He took a handset from his tools and plugged it into the jack below the thermostat. He jiggled a tiny switch and pressed a little red button, and after a full three minutes, he said, “Damn” under his breath and dropped the handset back into his toolkit.

  “Nobody’s paying much attention to the telephone from this section of Venus Equilateral anymore,” he said. “There’s a live one in the cold room, though. Let’s take a look around first.”

  “Which way?”

  Walt thought for a moment. “We set the cold room about one-third of the way from the north end because it was as far from the rest of the station’s operating and living section as possible while commensurable with being reasonably close to the labs,” he said. “We’re not very far—perhaps a hundred yards—from the axis. We’re about a mile from the north end.

  “Now, if I were Kingman, I’d set up shop in some place as far from the operating section as possible, commensurable with an out-of-the-way place—and definitely far from the laboratories. Then I’d select a place as far from me as I could get without too much danger of having the effect detected.”

  Christine nodded. “If Venus Equilateral were a cube, you’d take one corner and chill off the opposite corner.”

  “Venus Equilateral is a cylinder and the skin is filled with people. However, you can set up an equation in differential calculus that will give you two spots as far from one another as possible, with the least danger of detection from the ends or skin of a cylinder. The answer will give you two toroidal volumes located inside of the cylinder. You set your workshop in one and start the chill-off in the other—and right across the center from you.”

  “And?” Christine prompted with a smile.

  “We used the same equation to locate the least dangerous place. Predicated on the theory that if the personnel need be protected from the danger area as much as the danger area need be concealed from people, we can assume the use of the same constants. Now, since by sheer coincidence Markus the Kingman selected a spot in the toroid that we also selected, it narrows our search considerably.”
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  “In other words, we chase down the length of the station, cross the axis, and knock on Kingman’s door.”

  “Right,” said Walt.

  And being firmly convinced that mixing pleasure with business often makes the business less objectionable, Walt kissed Christine once more before they started toward the place where they expected to find their troublemaker.

  “About here,” said Walt, looking up at a smooth bulkhead.

  “How are we going to find him?” asked Christine.

  The corridor was long and die-straight, but both walls were sheer for thirty feet and unbroken.

  “Look, I guess,” said Walt uncertainly. “I’m not too familiar with this section of the station. When I was first here—many years ago—I spent a lot of spare time roaming and exploring these seldom-used corridors. But my Boy Scout hatchet wouldn’t cut trail blazes on the steel walls.” He laughed a bit thoughtfully, and then he put his hands to his mouth, cupping them like a megaphone, and yelled: “Hey! Kingman! We’re on to you!”

  “But what good will that do?” asked Christine doubtfully.

  “Might scare him into action,” said Walt. “Easiest way to shoot pa’tridge is to flush it into the open. Otherwise you might walk over a nest and never see it. I—Holy grease!”

  A four-foot section of the wall beside them flashed into nothingness with neither sound nor light nor motion. It just disappeared. And as they goggled at the vacant square, an ugly round circle glinted in the light and a sourly familiar voice invited them in—or else!

  “Well,” said Walt Franks, exhaling deeply. “If it isn’t Our Legal Lamp himself!”

  Kingman nodded snappishly. “You were looking for me?”

  “We were.”

  “It’s too bad you found me,” said Kingman.

  “It was just a matter of time before you dropped all pretense of being thinly legal,” said Walt scathingly. “I’ll give you credit, Kingman, for conducting yourself as close to the line without stepping over for a long time. But now you can add breaking and entering and kidnapping to whatever other crimes you have committed.”

  Kingman smiled in a superior manner. “I might,” he said suavely, “add murder. There would be no corpus delecti if both of you were fed into the duplicator.”

  “You can’t record a human being,” said Walt.

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Kingman. “Who said anything about making a record?”

  Walt admitted that this was so.

  Kingman snapped the switch on the duplicator and the wall was reestablished. Then he forced Christine to tie Walt, after which he tied Christine and then checked and added to Walt’s bonds from a large roll of friction tape. He dropped them side by side in chairs, and taped them thoroughly.

  “You are a damned nuisance,” he said. “Having to eliminate you tends to decrease my enjoyment at seeing the failure of Venus Equilateral. I’d have preferred to watch all of you suffer the hardest way. Killing you leaves fewer to gloat over, but it must be done. Once you found me, there is no other way.”

  “Walt,” pleaded Christine, “won’t the others find the same thing and follow us?”

  Walt wanted to lie—wanted desperately to lie, if for no other reason than to spare Christine the mental anguish of expecting death. But Walt was not a good liar.

  He gave up and said: “I happen to be the guy who rigged the thermal energy tube—and I’m the only guy who knows about the too-fast drop. All I hope for is that we’ll be missed.”

  “We will,” said Christine.

  Kingman laughed nastily and began to fiddle with the scanning-rate controls on his duplicator.

  * * *

  Arden came running into her husband’s office breathlessly. She was waving a sheet of paper and there was mingled anger and pleasure on her face as she shoved the paper under Don’s eyes and waggled it.

  “Look!” she commanded.

  “Stop fanning me with that,” said Channing, “and let me see it if it’s so all-fired important.”

  “I’ll murder ’em in cold blood,” Arden swore.

  Channing pried his wife’s fingers apart and took the paper. He read—and his eyes bulged with amused concern.

  Dear Characters:

  When we were giving Venus Equilateral’s advantages the up and down a coupla years ago after the sudden and warranted departure of Director Francis Burbank, we forgot one important item—a justice of the peace.

  So Christine and I are eloping in a time-honored fashion. Neither of us have any desire to get wedded in the midst of a Roman holiday, even though it does deprive a lot of guys the right to kiss the bride.

  You may give my Little Black Book to Jim Baler, Barney Carroll, and Wes—and have Arden see that they divide ’em up proportionately.

  Your ex-bachelor chum (p)

  Walt

  PS: He chased me ’til I caught him—

  Christine

  “Well,” chuckled Don good-naturedly, “that’s our Walt. He never did do anything the slow and easy way. Does Jim know?”

  “I dunno. Let’s find him and ask.”

  They found Jim and Barney in Farrell’s laboratory discussing the theories of operating a gigantic matter-transmitter affair to excavate sand from a cliff. Channing handed the note to Jim, who read it with a half-smile and handed it to Barney, who shared it with Wes while they read it together.

  Jim said, “I’m not surprised; Christine could have been talked into wedlock—holy or unholy—by a mere wink from Walt.”

  “I hope she’ll be kind to our little bucket-headed idiot,” said Arden, making to wipe tears with a large sheet of emery paper from Farrell’s workbench. “He’s been slightly soft-skulled ever since he set eye on that scheming hussy you have for a sister.”

  Barney shook his head sadly. “Poor guy.”

  “We ought to toast ’em though they aren’t here,” suggested Farrell.

  “A requiem toast.”

  “This,” chuckled Don Channing, “is one mess that Walt will have to get out of himself.”

  “Mess, is it?” Arden demanded with a glint in her eye. “Come, husband, I would have words with thee.”

  Don reached in his hip pocket. “Here,” he said, “just take my checkbook.”

  “I’d rather have words with you.”

  Don shook his head. “If I just give you the checkbook, you’ll use it reasonably sparingly, all things feminine considered. But gawd help the balance, once you get to talking me into writing the check myself. Besides, we’re about to hear from the Thomas boys again. They’re about to land at Canalopsis.”

  “I’ll wait,” said Arden, settling on a tall stool and lighting a cigarette.

  It took about ten minutes, and then Freddie Thomas’ voice came from the speaker, loud and clear. “Well, we’ve landed. We’re here. And where are you?”

  “Hang on, Freddie,” replied Farrell. “And we’ve some news for you. Walt Franks and Christine Baler have just committed matrimony.”

  “That’s fine—What? Who? When?”

  “They eloped. Left a note and took the Relay Girl, unbeknownst to all and sundry. Left their damned note right where the Relay Girl’s landing space was.”

  “Well, I’ll be—”

  Chuck’s voice came in. “He probably will,” he observed. “And you know, when I think of spending eternity with my brother, it’s enough to make a guy spend an exemplary life in the hope of going to Heaven so we can be apart. But I’ve got another guy here that might be interested.”

  “Hello, Channing?”

  “Well, if it ain’t Keg Johnson. Own Mars yet?”

  “No, but I’m damned interested in this coupled-crystal gadget of yours. Mind if I bring Linna out for a few days?”

  “Come ahead. Coming on Anopheles?” asked Don.

  Keg Johnson laughed. “Not a chance, Don. I own a spaceline, remember? And not wanting to cast disparagement at your type of genius, I’ll prefer riding in style at two gravities instead of blatting all ove
r the sky at five; ducking meters and festoons of cable; eating canned beans off a relay-rack shelf standing up; and waking up in the morning to the tune of Chuck Thomas carving a hole through the bedroom wall to make a straight-line half-wave dipole that won’t quite fit in otherwise.”

  “I’d send the Relay Girl,” said Don, “but it seems as how my old sidekick, Walt Franks, swiped it to locate a justice of the peace in the company of a young and impressionable gal named Christine.”

  “Nuts?”

  “If so, happy about it. Hope he’ll be home by Christmas, anyway.”

  “Well, we’ll be arriving in about ten days. See you then, Don.”

  “Right,” answered Channing, and Wes Farrell took the microphone to give the Thomas boys some information.

  Mark Kingman emerged from his tiny house in the huge storeroom and his breath blew out in a white cloud. He went to the couple tied to their chairs and said: “Cold, isn’t it?”

  Frank swore. Christine shivered despite the electrically heated clothing.

  “You know,” said Kingman, “those batteries are going to wear out sooner or later. I’d remove them and let the cold do its work, except for the fact that I’d have to loose you and get into the inside pocket of the suits. You stay tied!”

  “Having nothing to eat but your words is beginning to undermine my health,” snapped Walt. “Gonna starve us to death, too?”

  “Oh,” said Kingman expansively, “I’ve been devising a machine for you. As an inventor of note, you will appreciate little Joe. He will take care of you both, to keep you alive until the cold gets you.”

  He returned to his little house and emerged with a large, complicated gadget that he trundled to position in front of Walt and Christine. There was a large hopper above and a wild assortment of levers and gears interlocked in the body of the mechanism.

  Kingman pressed a button, and the gears whirled and the levers flashed—