Lost Art (i)
by George O. Smith
SARGON OF AKKAD was holding court in all of his splendor in the Mesopotamia
area, which he thought to be the center of the Universe. The stars to him
were but holes in a black bowl which he called the sky. They were beautiful
then, as they are now, but he thought that they were put there for his edifica-
tion only, for was he not the ruler of Akkadia?
After Sargon of Akkad, there would come sixty centuries of climbing
before men reached the stars and found not only that there had been men
upon them, but that a civilization on Mars had reached its peak four thou-
sand years before Christ and was now but a memory and a wealth of picto-
graphs that adorned the semipreserved Temple of Canalopsis.
and sixty centuries after, the men of Terra wondered about the ideographs
and solved them sufficiently to piece together the wonders of the long-dead
Martian Civilization.
Sargon of Akkad did not know that the stars that he beheld carried on
them wonders his mind would not, could not, accept.
Altas, the Martian, smiled tolerantly at his son. The young man boasted
on until Altas said: "So you have memorized the contents of my manual?
Good, Than, for I am growing old and I would be pleased to have my son
fill my shoes. Come into the workshop that I may pass upon your profi-
ciency."
Altas led Than to the laboratory that stood at the foot of the great tower
of steel; Altas removed from a cabinet a replacement element from the
great beam above their heads, and said: "Than, show me how to hook this
up!"
Than's eyes glowed. From other cabinets he took small auxiliary parts.
From hooks upon the wall, Than took lengths of wire. Working with a
brilliant deftness that was his heritage as a Martian, Than spent an hour
attaching the complicated circuits. After he was finished, Than stepped
back and said: "There——and believe it or not, this is the first time you
have permitted me to work with one of the bean elements."
"You have done well," said Altas with that same cryptic smile. "But
now we shall see. The main question is: Does it work?"
"Naturally," said Than in youthful pride. "Is it not hooked up exactly
as your manual says? It will work."
"We shall see," repeated Altas. "We shall see."
Barney Carroll and James Baker cut through the thin air of Mars in a
driver-wing flier at a terrific rate of speed. It was the only kind of flier that
would work on Mars with any degree of safety since it depended upon the
support of its drivers rather than on wing surface. They were hitting it up
at almost a thousand miles an hour on their way from Canalopsis to Lincoln
Head; their trip would take an hour and a half.
As they passed over the red sand of Mars, endlessly it seemed, a glint
of metal caught Barney's eye and he shouted.
"What's the matter, Barney?" asked Jim.
"Roll her over and run back a mile or so," said Barney. "I saw something
down there that didn't belong in this desert."
Jim snapped the plane around in a sharp loop that nearly took their
heads off, and they ran back along their course.
"Yop," called Barney, "there she is!"
"What?"
"See that glint of shiny metal? That doesn't belong in this mess of erosion.
Might be a crash."
"Hold tight," laughed Jim. "We're going down."
They did. Jim's piloting had all the aspects of a daredevil racing pilot's,
and Barney was used to it. Jim snapped the nose of the little flier down
and they power-dived to within a few yards of the sand before he set the
plane on its tail and skidded flatwise to kill speed. He levelled off, and the
flier came screaming in for a perfect landing not many feet from the glinting
object.
"This is no crash," said Baler. "This looks like the remains of an air-lane
beacon of some sort."
"Does it? Not like any I've ever seen. It reminds me more of some of the
gadgets they find here and there——the remnants of the Ancients. They used
to build junk like this."
"Hook up the sand-blower," suggested Jim Baler. "We'll clear some of
this rubble away and see what she really looks like. Can't see much more
than what looks like a high-powered searchlight."
Barney hauled equipment out of the flier and hitched it to a small motor
in the plane. The blower created a small storm for an hour or so, its blast
directed by suit-clad Barney Carroll. Working with experience gained in
uncovering the remains of a dozen dead and buried cities, Barney cleared
the shifting sand from the remains of the tower.
The head was there, preserved by dry sand. Thirty feet below the
platform, the slender tower was broken off. No delving could find the lower
portion.
This is quite a find," said Jim. "Looks like some of the carvings on the
Temple of Science at Canalopsis––that little house on the top of the spire
with the three-foot runway around it; then the dingbat perched on top of
the roof. Never did figure out what it was for."
"We don't know whether the Martians' eyes responded as our do," sug-
gested Barney. "This might be a searchlight that puts out with Martian
visible spectrum. If they saw with infrared, they wouldn't be using Terran
fluorescent lighting. If they saw with long heat frequencies, they wouldn't
waste power with even a tungsten filament light, but would have invented
something that cooked its most energy in the visible spectrum, just as we have
in the last couple of hundred years."
"That's just a guess, of course."
"Naturally," said Barney. "Here, I've got the door cracked. Let's be the
first people in this place for six thousand years Terran. Take it easy, this
floor is at an angle of thirty degrees."
"I won't side. G'wan in. I'm your shadow."
They entered the thirty-foot circular room and snapped on their torches.
There was a bench that ran almost around the entire room. It was empty
save for a few scraps of metal and a Martian book of several hundred metal
pages.
":Nuts," said Barney, "we would have to find a thing like this but empty.
That's our luck. What's the book, Jim?"
"Some sort of text, I'd say. Full of diagrams and what seems to be mathe-
matics. Hard to tell, of course, but we've established the fact that mathe-
matics is universal, though the characters can not possibly be."
"Any chance of deciphering it?" asked Barney.
"Let's get back in the flier and try. I'm in no particular hurry."
"Nor am I. I don't care whether we get to Lincoln Head tonight or the
middle of next week."
"Now let's see that volume of diagrams," he said as soon as they were
established in the flier.
Jim passed the book over, and Barney opened the book to the first page.
If we never find anything else," he said, "this will make us famous. I am
now holding the first complete volume of Martian literature that anyone
has ever seen. The darned thing is absolutely complete, from cover to cover!"
"That's a find," agreed Jim. "Now go ahead and transliterate it——you're
the expert on Martian pictographs."
For an hour, Barney scanned the pages of the volume. He made copious
notes on sheets of paper which he inserted between the metal leaves of the
book. At the end of that time, during which Jim Baler had been inspecting
the searchlight-thing on the top of the little house, he called to his friend,
and Jim entered the flier lugging the thing on his shoulders.
"What'cha got?" he grinned. "I brought this along. Nothing else in that
shack, so we're complete except for the remnants of some very badly corroded
cable that ran from this thing to a flapping end down where the tower
was broken. "
Barney smiled and blinked. It was strange to see this big man working
studiously over a book; Barney Carroll should have been leading a horde
of Venusian engineers through the Palanortis country instead of delving into
the artifacts of a dead civilization.
"I think this thing is a sort of engineer's handbook," he said. "In the
front there is a section devoted to mathematical tables. You know, a table
of logs to the base twelve which is because the Martians had six fingers on
each hand. There is what seems to be a table of definite integrals——at least
if I were writing a handbook I'd b=place the table of integrals at the last part
of the math section. The geometry and trig is absolutely recognizable be-
cause of the designs. So is the solid geom and the analyt for the same reason.
The next section seems to be devoted to chemistry; the Martians used a
hexagonal figure for the benzene ring, too, and so that's established, From
that we find the key to the Periodic Chart of the Atoms which is run verti-
cally instead of horizontally, but still unique. These guys were sharp,
though; they seem to have hit upon the fact that isotopes are separate ele-
ments though so close in grouping to one another that they exhibit the same
properties. Finding this will uncover a lot of the mystery."
"Yeah," agreed Baler, "from a book of this kind we can decipher most
anything. The keying on a volume of physical constants is perfect and
almost infinite in number. What do they use for Pi?"
"Circle with a double dot inside."
"And Planck's Constant?"
"Haven't hit that one yet. But we will. But to get back to the meat of
this thing, the third section deals with something strange. It seems to have
a bearing on this gadget from the top of the tower. I'd say that the volume
was a technical volume on the construction, maintenance, and repair of the
tower and its functions——whatever they are."
Barney spread the volume out for Jim to see. "That dingbat is some sort
of electronic device. Or, perhaps subelectronic. Peel away that rusted side
and we'll look inside."
Jim peeled a six-inch section from the side of the big metal tube, and
they inspected the insides. Barney looked thoughtful for a minute and then
flipped the pages of the book until he came to a diagram.
"Sure," he said exultantly, "this is she. Look, Jim, they draw a cathode
like this, and the grids are made with a series of fine parallel lines. Different,
but more like the real grid than our symbol of a zigzag line. The plate is a
round circle instead of a square, but that's so clearly defined that it comes out
automatically. Here's your annular electrodes, and the . . . call 'em de-
flection plates. I think we can hook this do-boodle up as soon as we get to
our place in Lincoln Head."
"Let's go then. Not only would I like to see this thing work, but I'd give
anything to know what it's for!"
"You run the crate," said Barney, "and I'll try to decipher this mess into
voltages for the electrode supply and so on. Then we'll be in shape to go
ahead and hook her up."
The trip to Lincoln Head took almost an hour. Barney and Jim landed
in their landing yards and took the book and the searchlight-thing inside.
They went to their laboratory, and called for sandwiches and tea. Jim's
sister brought in the food a little later and found them tinkering with the
big beam tube.
"What have you got this time?" she groaned.
"Name it and it's yours," laughed Barney.
"A sort of gadget we found on the Red Desert."
"What does it do?" asked Christine Baler.
"Well," said Jim, "it's a sort of a kind of a dingbat that does things."
"Uh-huh," said Christine. "A dololly that plings the inghams."
"Right!"
"You're well met, you two. Have your fun. But for Pete's sake don't forget
to eat. Not that you will, I know you, but a girl has got to make some sort of
attempt at admonishment. I'm going to the moompicher. I'll see you when
I return."
"I'd say stick around," said Barney. But I don't think we'll have anything
to show you for hours and hours. We'll have something by the time you
return."
Christine left, and the men applied themselves to their problem. Barney
had done wonders in unraveling the unknown. Inductances, he found were
spirals; resistances were dotted lines; capacitances were parallel squares.
"What kind of stuff do we use for voltages?" asked Jim.
"That's a long, hard trail," laughed Barney. "Basing my calculations on
the fact that their standard voltage cell was the same as ours, we apply
the voltages as listed on my schematic here."
"Can you assume that their standard is the same as ours?"
"Better," said Barney. "The Terran Cell——the well-known
Weston Cell——dishes out what we call 1.0183 volts at twenty degrees C.
Since the Martian description of their Standard Cell is essentially the same
as the Terran, they are using the same thing. Only they use sense and say
that a volt is the unit of a standard cell. period. Calculating their figures
on the numerical base of twelve is tricky, but I've done it."
"You're doing fine. How do you assume their standard is the same?"
"Simple," said Barney in a cheerful tone. "Thank God for their habit
of drawing pictures. Here we have the well-known H tube. The electrodes
are signified by the symbols for the elements used. The Periodic Chart in
the first section came in handy here. But look, master mind, this dinky
should be evacuated, don't you think?"
"If it's electronic or subelectronic, it should be. We can solder up this
breach here and apply the hyvac pump. Rig us up a power supply whilst I
repair the blowout."
"Where's the BFO?"
"What do you want with that?" asked Jim.
"The second anode takes about two hundred volts worth of eighty-four
cycles," explained Barney. "Has a sin that seems to indicate 'In Phase,' but
I'll be darned if I know with what. Y'know, Jim, this dingbat looks an
awful lot like one of the drives we use in our spaceships and driver-wing
fliers."
"Yeah," drawled Jim. "About the same recognition as the difference be-
tween Edison's first electric light, and a twelve-element, electron multiplier,
a power output tube. Similarity: They both have cathodes."
"Edison didn't have a cathode——"
Sure he did. Just because he didn't hang a plate inside of the bottle
doesn't stop the filament from being a cathode."
Barney snorted. "A monode, hey?"
"Precisely. After which come diodes, triodes, tetrotes, pentodes, hexodes,
heptodes——"
"——and the men in the white coats. How's your patching job?"
"Fine. How's your power supply job?"
"Good enough," said Barney. "This eighty-four cycles is not going to be
a sine wave at two hundred volts; the power stage of the BFO overloads
just enough to bring in a bit of second harmonic."
"A beat-frequency-oscillator was never made to run at that level," com-
plained Jim Baler." At least, not this one. She'll tick on a bit of second, I
think."
"Are we ready for the great experiment?"
"Yup, and I still wish I knew what the thing was for. Go ahead, Barney.
Crack the big switch!"
Altas held up a restraining hand as Than grasped the main power switch.
"Wait," he said. Does one stand in his sky flier and leave the ground at
full velocity? Or does one start an internal combustion engine at full speed?"
"No," said the youngster. "We usually take it slowly."
"And like the others, we must tune our tube. And that we cannot do
under full power. Advance your power lever one-tenth step and we'll adjust
the detection anodes."
"I'll get the equipment," smile Altas. "Observe."
Altas picked up a long screwdriverlike tool and inserted it into the maze
of wiring that surrounded the tube. Squinting in one end of the big tube,
he turned the tool until the cathode surface brightened slightly. He adjusted
the instrument until the cathode was at its brightest, and then withdrew
the tool.
"That will do for your experimental set-up," smiled Altas. "The operation
in service is far more critical and requires equipment. As an experiment,
conducted singly, the accumulative effect cannot be dangerous, though if the
deflection plates are not properly served with their supply voltages, the ex-
periment is a failure. The operation of the tube depends upon the perfection
of the deflection-plate voltages."
"No equipment is required, then?"
"It should have been employed," said Altas modestly. "But in my years
as a beam-tower attendant, I have learned the art of aligning the plates by
eye. Now, son, we may proceed from there."
Barney Carroll took a deep breath and let the power switch fall home.
Current meters swung across their scales for an instant, and then the lights
went out in the house!
"Fuse blew," said Barney shortly. He fumbled his way through the
dark house and replaced the fuse. He returned smiling. "Fixed that one,"
he told Jim. "Put a washer behind it."
"O.K. Hit the switch again."
"Barney cranked the power over, and once more the meters climbed up
across the scales. There was a groaning sound from the tube, and the smell
of burning insulation filled the room. One meter blew with an audible sound
as the needle hit the end stop, and immediately afterward the lights in the
entire block went out.
"Fix that one by hanging a penny behind it," said Jim with a grin.
"That's a job for Martian Electric to do," laughed Barney.
Several blocks from there, an attendant in the substation found the open
circuit-breaker and shoved it in with a grim smile. He looked up at the
power-demand meter and grunted. High for this district, but not dangerous.
Duration, approximately fifteen second. Intensity, higher than usual but
not high enough to diagnose any failure of the wiring in the district. "Ah,
well," he thought, "we can crank up the blow-point on this breaker if it
happens again."
He turned to leave and the crashing of the breaker scared him out of a
week's growth. He snarled and said a few choice words not fit for publication.
He closed the breaker and screwed the blow-point control up by two-to-one.
"That'll hold 'em," h thought, and then the ringing of the telephone called
him to his office, and he knew that he was in for an explanatory session with
some people who wanted to know why their lights were going on and off.
He composed a plausible tale in his way to the phone. Meanwhile, he
wondered about the unreasonable demand and concluded that one of the
folks had just purchased a new power saw or something for their home
workshop.
"Crack the juice about a half," suggested barney. "That'll keep us on
the air until we find out what kind of stuff this thing takes. The book claims
about one tenth of the current-drain for this unit. Something we've missed,
no doubt."
"Let's see that circuit," said Jim. After a minute, he said: "Look, guy,
what are these screws for?"
"They change the side plate voltages from about three hundred to about
thee hundred and fifty. I've got 'em set in the middle of the range."
"Turn us on half voltage and diddle one of 'em."
"That much of a change shouldn't make the difference," objected Barney.
"Brother, we don't know what this thing is even for," reminded Jim.
"Much less do we know the effect of anything on it. Diddle, I say."
"O.K., we diddle." Barney turned on half power and reached into the
maze of wiring and began to tinker with one of the screws. "Hm-m-m," he
said after a minute. "Does things, all right. She goes through some kind of
resonance point or something. There is a spot of minimum current here.
There! I've hit it. Now for the other one."
For an hour, Barney tinkered with first one screw and then the other one.
He found a point where the minimum current was really low; the two
screws were independent and only by adjusting them alternately was he
able to reach the proper point on each. Then he smiled and thrust the
power on full. The current remained at a sane value.
""Now what?" asked Barney.
"I don't know. Anything coming out of the business end?"
"Heat."
"Yeah, and it's about as lethal as a sun lamp. D'ye suppose the Martians
used to artificially assist their crop by synthetic sunshine?"
Barney applied his eye to a spectroscope. It was one of the newer designs
that encompassed everything from short ultraviolet to long infrared by means
of fluorescent screens at the invisible wave lengths. he turned the instrument
across the spectrum and shook his head. "Might be good for chest cold,"
he said, "but you wouldn't get a sunburn off of it. It's all in the infra. Drops
off like a cliff just below the deep red. Nothing at all in the visible or above.
Gee," he said with a queer smile, "you don't suppose that they died off
because of a pernicious epidemic of colds and they tried chest-cooking en
masse?"
"I'd believe anything if this darned gadget were found in a populated
district," said Jim. "But we know that the desert was here when the Martians
were here, and that it was just as arid as it is now. They wouldn't try farming
a place where iron oxide abounds."
"Spinach?"
"You don't know a lot about farming, do you?" asked Jim.
"I saw a cow once."
"That does not qualify you as an expert on farming."
"I know one about a farmer's daughter, and——"
"Not even an expert on dirt farming," continued Jim. "Nope, Barney,
we aren't even close."
Barney checked the book once more and scratched his nose.
"How about that eighty-four cycle supply," asked Jim.
"It's eighty-four, all right. From the Martian habit of using twelve as a
base, I've calculated the number to be eighty-four."
"Diddle that, too," suggested Jim.
"O.K.," said Barney. "It doesn't take a lot to crank that one around
from zero to about fifteen thousand c.p.s. Here she goes!"
Barney took the main dial of the beat-frequency oscillator and began to
crank it around the scale. He went up from eighty-four to the top of the dial
and then returned. No effect. Then he passed through eighty-four and started
down toward zero.
He hit sixty cycles and the jackpot at the same time!
At exactly sixty cycles, a light near the wall dimmed visibly. The wall
paper scorched and burst in to a smoldering flame on a wall opposite the
dimmed light.
Barney removed the BFO from the vicinity of sixty cycles and Jim ex-
tinguished the burning wallpaper.
"Now we're getting somewhere," said Barney.
"This is definitely some sort of weapon," said Jim. "She's not very efficient
right now, but we can find out why and then we'll have something hot."
"What for?" asked Barney. "nobody hates anybody any more."
"Unless the birds who made this thing necessary return," said Jim soberly.
His voice was ominous. "We know that only one race of Martians existed,
and they were all amicable. I suspect an inimical race from outer space——
"Could be. Some of the boys are talking about an expedition to Centauri
right now. We could have had a visitor from somewhere during the past."
"If you define eternity as the time required for everything to happen once,
I agree. In the past or in the future, we have or will be visited by a super race.
It may have happened six thousand years ago."
"Did you notice that the electric light is not quite in line with the axis of
the tube?" asked Barney.
"Don't turn it any closer," said Jim. "In fact, I'd turn it away before we
hook it up again."
"There she is. Completely out of line with the light. Now shall we try
it again?"
"Go ahead."
Barney turned the BFO gingerly, and at sixty cycles the thing seemed
quite sane. Nothing happened. "Shall I swing it around?"
"I don't care for fires as a general rule," said Jim. "Especially in my own
home. Turn it gently, and take care that you don't focus the tube full on
that electric light."
Barney moved the tube slightly, and then with a cessation of noise, the
clock on the wall stopped abruptly. The accustomed ticking had not been
noticed by either man, but the unaccustomed lack-of-ticking became evident
at once. Barney shut off the BFO immediately and the two men sat down
to a head-scratching session.
"She's good for burning wallpaper, dimming electric lights, and stopping
clocks," said Barney. "Any of which you could do without a warehouse full of
cockeyed electrical instruments. Wonder if she'd stop anything more power-
ful than a clock."
"I've got a quarter-horse motor here. Let's wind that up and try it."
The motor was installed on a bench nearby, and the experiment was
tried again. At sixty cycles the motor groaned to a stop, and the windings
began to smolder. But at the same time the big tube began to exhibit the
signs of strain. Meters raced up their scales once more, reached the stops
and bent. Barney shut off the motor, but the strains did not stop in the tube.
The apparent overload increased linearly and finally the lights went out all
over the neighborhood once more.
"Wonderful," said Barney through the darkness. "As a weapon, this thing
is surpassed by everything above a fly swatter."
"We might be able to cook a steak with it——if it would take the terrific
overload," said Jim. "Or we could use it as an insect exterminator."
"We'd do better by putting the insect on an anvil and hitting it firmly
with a five-pound hammer," said Barney. "Then we'd only have the anvil
and hammer to haul around. This thing is like handing a fifty-thousand-watt
radio transmitter around. Power supplies, BFO, tube, meters, tools, and a
huge truck full of spare fuses for the times when we miss the insect, Might
be good for a central heating system."
"Except tat a standard electric unit is more reliable and considerably
less complicated. You'd have to hire a corps of engineers to run the thing."
The lights went on again, and the attendant in the substation screwed
the blow-point control tighter. He didn't know it, his level was now above
the rating for his station. But had he known it he might not have cared.
At least, his station was once more in operation.
"Well," said Barney, getting up from the table, "what have we missed?"
Altas said: "Now your unit is operating at its correct level. But, son,
you've missed one thing. It is far from efficient. Those two leads must be
isolated from one another. Coupling from one to the other will lead to losses."
"Gosh," said Than, "I didn't know that."
"No, for some reason the books assume that the tower engineer has had
considerable experience in the art. Take it from me, son, there are a lot of
things that are not in the books. Now isolate those leads from one another
and we'll go on."
Story copyright 1943 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.
Reprinted from Astounding Science Fiction
Reprinted in A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, Vol. 2,
Edited by Anthony Boucher,
Copyright © 1959 by Anthony Boucher.
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York. pp. 187 - 196
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