Lost Art (ii)
by George O. Smith
"While you're thinking," said Jim, "I'm going to lockstitch these cables
together. It'll make this thing less messy." Jim got a roll of twelve-cord
from the cabinet and began to bind the many supply leads into a neat cable.
Barney watched until the job was finished, and then said: "Look, chum,
let's try that electric-light trick again."
They swung the tube around until it was in the original position, and
turned the juice on. Nothing happened.
Barney looked at Jim, and then reached out and pointed the big tube
right at the electric light.
Nothing happened.
"Check your anode voltages again."
"All O.K."
How about that aligning job?"
Barney fiddled with the alignment screws for minutes, but his original
setting seemed to be valid.
"Back to normal," said Barney. "Rip out your cabling."
"Huh?"
"Sure. You did something. I don't know what. But rip it out and fan out
the leads. There is something screwy in the supply line. I've been tied up on
that one before; this thing looks like electronics, as we agree, and I've had
occasion to remember coupling troubles."
"All right," said Jim, killing the circuits and reaching for a small
rug to smother the fire. "No wonder the Martians had this thing out in the
middle of the desert. D'ye suppose that they were trying to find out how it
works, too?"
"Take it easier this time and we'll fan the various leads," said Barney.
There's something tricky about the lead placement."
"Half power," announced Barney. "Now, let's get that sixty cycles."
The light dimmed slightly and a sheet of metal placed in front of the tube
became slightly warm to the touch. The plate stopped the output of the
tube, for the wallpaper did not scorch. Jim began to take supply line after
supply line from the bundle of wiring. About halfway through the mess he
hit the critical lead, and immediately the light went out completely, and
the plate grew quite hot.
"Stop her!" yelled Barney.
"Why?"
"How do we know what we're overloading this time?"
"Do we care?"
"Sure. Let's point this thing away from that light. Then we can hop it
up again and try it at full power."
"What do you want try?"
"This energy-absorption thing."
"Wanna burn out my motor?"
"Not completely. This dingbat will stop a completely mechanical gadget
like a clock. It seems to draw power from electric lights. It stops electro-
mechanical power. I wonder just how far it will go toward absorbing power.
And also I want to know where the power goes."
The tube was made to stop the clock again. The motor groaned under the
load put upon it by the tube. Apparently the action of the tube was similar
to a heavy load being placed on whatever its end happened to point to.
Barney picked up a small metal block and dropped it over the table.
"Want to see if it absorbs the energy of a falling object—— Look at that!"
The block fell until it came inside of he influence of the tube. Then it
slowed in its fall and approached the table slowly. It did not hit the table,
it touched and came to rest.
"What happens if we wind up a spring and tie it?" asked Jim.
They tried it. Nothing happened.
"Works on kinetic energy, not potential energy," said Barney.
He picked up a heavy hammer and tried to hit the table. "Like swinging
a club through a tub of water," he said.
"Be a useful gadget for saving the lives of people who are falling," said
Jim thoughtfully.
"Oh, sure. Put it on a truck and rush it out to the scene of the suicide."
"No. How about people jumping out of windows on account of fires?
How about having one of the things around during a flier-training course?
Think of letting a safe down on one of hose beams, or taking a piano from
the fifth floor of an apartment building."
"The whole apartment full of furniture could be pitched out of a window,"
said Barney.
"Mine looks that way now," said Jim, "and we've only moved a couple of
times. No, Barney, don't give 'em any ideas."
Jim picked up the hammer and tried to hit the table. Then, idly, he
swung the hammer in the direction of the tube's end.
Barney gasped. In this direction there was no resistance. Jim's swing
continued, and the look on Jim's face indicated that he was trying to brake
the swing in time to keep from hitting the end of the tube. But it seemed as
though he were trying to stop an avalanche. The swing continued on and on
and finally ended when the hammer head contacted the end of the tube.
There was a burst of fire. Jim swung right on through, whirling around
off balance and coming to a stop only when he fell to the floor. He landed
in darkness again. The burst of fire emanated from the insulation as it
flamed under the heat of extreme overload.
This time the lights were out all over Lincoln Head. The whole city was
in complete blackout!
Candles were found, and they inspected the tube anxiously. It seemed
whole. But the hammer head was missing. The handle was cut cleanly, on
an optically perfect surface.
Where the hammer head went, they couldn't say. But on the opposite wall
there was a fracture in the plaster that Jim swore hadn't been there before.
It extended over quite an area, and after some thought, Barney calculated
that if the force of Jim's hammer blow had been evenly distributed over that
area on the wall, the fracturing would have been just about that bad.
"A weapon, all right," said Barney.
"Sure. All you have to do is to shoot your gun right in this end and the
force is dissipated over quite an area out of that end. In the meantime you
blow out all of the powerhouses on the planet. If a hammer blow can raise
such merry hell, what do you think the output of a sixteenth-inch rifle would
do? Probably stop the planet in its tracks. D'ye know what I think?"
"No, do you?"
"Barney, I think that we aren't even close as to the operation and use of
this device."
"For that decision, Jim, you should be awarded the Interplanetary Award
for Discovery and Invention——posthumously!"
"So what do we do now?"
"Dunno. How soon does this lightning situation get itself fixed?"
"You ask me . . . I don't know either."
"Well, let's see what we've found so far."
"That's easy," said Jim. "It might be a weapon, but it don't weap. We
might use it for letting elevators down easy, except that it would be a shame
to tie up a room full of equipment when the three-phase electric motor is
so simple. We could toast a bit of bread, but the electric toaster has been
refined to a beautiful piece of breakfast furniture that doesn't spray off and
scorch the wallpaper. We could use it to transmit hammer blows, or to turn
out electric lights, but both of those things have been done very simply; one
by means of sending the hammerer to the spot, and the other by means of
turning the switch. And then in the last couple of cases, there is little sense
in turning out a light by short circuiting the socket and blowing all the fuses."
"That is the hard way," smiled Barney. "Like hitting a telephone pole
to stop the car, or cutting the wings off a plane to return it to the ground."
So we have a fairly lucid book that describes the entire hook-up of the
thing except what it's for. It gives not only the use of this device, but also
variations and replacements. Could we figure it out by sheer deduction?"
"I don't see how. The tower is in the midst of the Red Desert. There is
nothing but sand that assays high in iron oxide between Canalopsis, at the
junction of the Grand Canal and Lincoln Head. Might be hid, of course,
just as this one was, and we'll send out a crew of expert sub-sand explorers
with under-surface detectors to cover the ground for a few hudred miles in
any direction from the place where we found this. Somehow, I doubt that
we'll find much."
"And how about you . . . ah, there's the lights again . . . deduce that?"
asked Jim.
"This gadget is or was of importance to the Martians. Yet the Temple
of Science and Industry at Canalopsis, there is scant mention of the towers."
"Not very much, hey?"
"Very little, in fact. Of course the pictographs on the Temple at
Canalopsis show one tower between what appeared to be two cities. Wavy
lines run from one city to the tower and to the other city. Say! I'll bet a cooky
that this is some sort of signaling device!"
"A beam transmitter?" asked Jim skeptically. "Seems like a lot of junk
for just signaling. Especially where such a swell job can be done with standard
radio equipment. A good civilization——such as the Martians must have had
——wouldn't piddle around with relay stations between two cities less than a
couple of thousand miles apart. With all the juice this thing can suck, they'd
be more than able to hang a straight broadcast station and cover halfway
around the planet as ground-wave area. What price relay station?"
"Nevertheless, I'm going to tinker up another one of these and see if it is
some sort of signaling equipment."
The door opened and Christine Baler entered. She waved a newspaper
before her brother's eyes and said: "Boy, have you been missing it!"
"What?" asked Barney.
"Pixies or gremlins loose in Lincoln Head."
"Huh-huh. Read it," said Jim.
"Just a bunch of flash headlines. Fire on Manley Avenue. Three planes
had to make dead-tube landings in the center of the city; power went dead
for no good reason for about ten minutes. Façade of the City Hall caved in.
Power plants running wild all over the place. Ten thousand dollars' worth of
electrical equipment blown out. Automobiles stalled in rows for blocks."
Jim looked at Barney. "Got a bear by the tail," he said.
"Could be," admitted Barney.
"Are you two blithering geniuses going to work all night?" asked Christine.
"Nope. We're about out of ideas. Except the one that Barney had about
the gadget being some sort of signaling system."
"Why don't you fellows call Don Channing? He's the signal wizard of
the Solar System."
"Sure, call Channing. Every time someone gets an idea, everyone says,
'Call Channing!' He gets called for everything from Boys Scout wigwag ideas
to super-cyclotronic-electron-stream beams to contact the outer planets.
Based upon the supposition that people will eventually get there, of course."
"Well?"
"Well, I . . . we, I mean . . . found this thing and we're jolly well going
to tinker it out. In spite of the fact that it seems to bollix up everything from
electric lights to moving gears. I think we're guilty of sabotage. Façade of
City Hall, et cetera. Barney, how long do you think it will take to tinker
up another one of these?"
"Few hours. They're doggone simple in spite of the fact that we
can't understand them. In fact, I'm of the opinion that the real idea would
be to make two; one with only the front end for reception, one for the rear
end for transmission, and the one we found for relaying. That's the natural
bent, I believe."
"Could be. Where are you going to cut them?"
"The transmitter will start just before the cathode and the receiver will
end just after the . . . uh, cathode."
"Huh?"
"Obviously the cathode is the baby that makes the end product.
She seems to be a total intake from the intake end and a complete output
from the opposite end. Right?"
"Right, but it certainly sounds like heresy."
"I know," said Barney thoughtfully, "but the thing is obviously different
from anything that we know today. Who knows how she works?"
"I give up."
Christine, who had been listening in an interested manner, said: "You
fellers are the guys responsible for the ruckus that's been going on all over
Lincoln Head?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Well, brother warlocks, unless you keep your activities under cover until
they're worth mentioning, you'll both be due for burning at the stake."
"O.K. Chris," said Jim. "We'll not let it out."
"But how are you going to tinker up that transmitter-relay-receiver system?"
"We'll take it from here to Barney's place across the avenue and into his
garage. That should do it."
"O.K., but now I'm going to bed."
"Shall we knock off, too?" asked Jim.
"Yup. Maybe we'll dream a good thought."
"So long then. We'll leave the mess as it is. No use cleaning up now, we'll
only have to mess it up again tomorrow with the same junk."
"And I'll have that——or those——other systems tinkered together by to-
morrow noon. That's a promise," said Barney. "And you," he said to
Christine, "will operate the relay station."
Altas said to Than: "Now that your system is balanced properly, and we
have proved the worth of this tube as a replacement, we shall take it to the
roof and install it. The present tube is about due for retirement."
"I've done very well, then?" asked Than.
"Considering all, you've done admirably. But balancing the device in the
tower, and hooked into the circuit as an integral part is another thing.
Come, Than. We shall close the line for an hour whilst repairing the tube."
"Is that permissible?"
"At this time of the night the requirements are small. No damage will
be done; they can get along without us for an hour. In fact, at this time of
night, only the people who are running the city will know that we are out of
service. And it is necessary that the tube be maintained at full capability.
We cannot chance a weakened tube; it might fail when it is needed the
most."
Than carried the tube to the top of the tower, and Altas remained to
contact the necessary parties concerning the shut-off for replacement pur-
poses. He followed Than to the top after a time and said: "Now disconnect
the old tube and put it on the floor. We shall replace the tube immediately,
but it will be an hour before it is properly balanced again."
"It was not long before Than had the tube connected properly. "Now."
said Altas, "turn it on one-tenth power and we shall align it."
"Shall I use the meters?"
"I think it best. This requires perfect alignment now. We've much power
and considerable distance, and any losses will create great amounts of heat."
"All right," said Than. He left the tower top to get the meters.
Barney Carroll spoke into a conveniently place microphone. "Are you
ready?" he asked.
"Go ahead," said Christine.
"We're waiting," said Jim.
"You're the bird on the transmitter," said Barney to Jim. You make with
the juice."
Power rheostats were turned up gingerly, until Jim shouted to stop. His
shout was blotted out by the cries from the other two. They met in Barney's
place to confer.
"What's cooking?" asked Jim.
"The meters are all going crazy in my end," said Barney. "I seem to be
sucking power out of everything in line with my tube."
"The so-called relay station is firing away at full power and doing nothing
but draining plenty of power from the line," complained Christine.
"And on my end, I was beginning to scorch the wallpaper again. I don't
understand it. With no receiver-end, how can I scorch wallpaper?"
"Ask the Martians. They know."
"You ask 'em. What shall we do, invent a time machine and go back
sixty centuries?"
"Wish we could," said Barney. "I'd like to ask the bird that left this
textbook why they didn't clarify it more."
"Speaking of Don Channing again," said Jim, "I'll bet a hat that one of
his tube-replacement manuals for the big transmitters out on Venus Equi-
lateral do not even mention that the transmitter requires a receiver before it
is any good. We think we're modern. We are, and we never think that some
day some poor bird will try to decipher our technical works. Why, if Volta
himself came back and saw the most perfect machine ever invented——the
transformer——he'd shudder. No connection between input and output,
several kinds of shorted loops of wire; and instead of making a nice simple
electromagnet, we short the lines of force and on top of that we use a lot of
laminations piled on top of one another instead of a nice, soft iron core. We
completely short the input, et cetera, but how do we make with a gadget like
that?"
"I know. We go on expecting to advance. We forget the simple past.
Remember the lines of that story: 'How does one chip the flint to make the
best arrowhead?' I don't know who wrote it any more than I know how to
skin a boar, but we do get on without making arrowheads or skinning boars
or trimming birch-bark canoes."
"All right, but there's still this problem."
"Remember how we managed to align this thing? I wonder if it might not
take another alignment to make it work as a relay."
"Could be," said Jim. "I'll try it. Christine, you work these screws at
the same time we do, and make the current come out as low as we can."
They returned to their stations and began to work on the alignment screws.
Jim came out first on the receiver. Christine was second on the transmitter,
while barney fumbled for along time with the relay tube.
"Then Christine called: "Fellows, my meter readings are climbing up
again. Shall I diddle?"
"Wait a minute," said Barney. "That means I'm probably taking power
out of that gadget you have in there. Leave 'em alone."
He fiddled a bit more, and then Jim called: "Whoa, Nellie. Someone
just lost a millimeter. She wound up on the far end."
"Hm-m-m," said Barney, "so we're relaying."
"Go ahead," said Jim. "I've got a ten-ampere meter on here now."
Barney adjusted the screws some more.
"Wait a minute," said Jim. "I'm going to shunt this meter up to a hundred
amps."
"What?" yelled Barney.
"Must you yell?" asked Christine ruefully. "These phones are plenty
uncomfortable without some loud-mouth bird screaming."
"Sorry, but a hundred amps . . . whoosh! What have we got here, any-
way?"
"Yeah," said Christine. "I was about to say that my input meter is running
wild again."
"Gone?"
"Completely. You shouldn't have hidden it behind that big box. I didn't
notice it till just now, but she's completely gone."
"I'll be over. I think we've got something here."
An hour passed, during which nothing of any great importance happened.
By keying the transmitter tube, meters in the receiver tube were made to
read in accordance. Then they had another conclave.
"Nothing brilliant," said Jim. "We could use super-output voice amplifiers
and yell halfway across the planet if we didn't have radio. We can radio far
better than this cockeyed system of signaling."
"We might cut the power."
"Or spread out quite a bit. I still say, however, that this is no signaling
system."
"It works like one."
"So can a clothesline be made to serve as a transmitter of intelligence.
But its prime function is completely different."
"S'pose we have a super-clothesline here?" asked Christine.
"The way that hammer fell last night, I'm not too sure that this might not
be some sort of tractor beam," said Jim.
"Tractor beams are mathematically impossible."
"Yeah, and they proved conclusively that a bird cannot fly," said Jim.
"That was before they found the right kind of math. Up until Clerk Max-
well's time, radio was mathematically impossible. Then he discovered the
electromagnetic equations, and we're squirting signals across the Inner
System every day. And when math and fact do not agree, which changes?"
"The math. Galileo proved that. Aristotle said that a heavy stone will fall
faster. Then Galileo changed the math of that by heaving a couple of
boulders off the Leaning Tower. But what have we here?"
"Has anyone toyed with the transmission of power?"
"Sure. A lot of science-fiction writers have their imaginary planets criss-
crossed with transmitted power. Some broadcast it, some have it beamed to
the consumer. When they use planes, they have the beam coupled to an
object-finder so as to control the direction of the beam. I prefer the broad-
casting, myself. It uncomplicates the structure of the tale."
"I mean actually?"
"Oh, yes. But the losses are terrific. Useful power transmission is a
minute percentage of the total output of the gadget. Absolutely impractical,
especially when copper and silver are so plentiful to string along the
scenery on steel towers. No good."
"But look at this cockeyed thing. Christine puts in a couple of hundred
amps; I take them off my end. Believe it or not, the output meter at my end
was getting a lot more soup than I was pouring in."
"And my gadget was not taking anything to speak of," said Barney.
"Supposing it was a means of transmitting power. How on Mars did they
use a single tower there in the middle of the Red Desert? We know there was
a Martian city at Canalopsis, and another one not many miles from Lincoln
Head. Scribbled on the outer coffer of this book is the legend: "Tower
Station, Red Desert," and though the Martians didn't call this the 'Red
Desert,' the terminology will suffice for nomenclature."
"Well?" asked Jim.
"You notice they did not say: 'Station No. 1,' or '3' or '7.' That means to
me that there was but one."
Holy Smoke! Fifteen hundred miles with only one station? On Mars
the curvature of the ground would put a station below the electrical
horizon——" Jim thought that one over for a minute and then said: "Don't
tell me they bent the beam?"
"Either they did that or they heated up the sand between," said Barney
cryptically. "It doesn't mind going through nonconducting walls, but a nice,
fat ground . . . blooey, or I miss my guess. That'd be like grounding a high
line."
"You're saying that they did bend—— Whoosh, again!"
"What was that alignment problem? Didn't we align the deflecting anodes
somehow?"
"Yeah, but you can't bend the output of a cathode ray tube externally
of the deflection plates."
"But this is not electron-bean stuff," objected Barney. "This is as far
ahead of cathode-ray tubes as they are ahead of the Indian signal drum or
the guy who used to run for twenty-four miles from Ghent to Aix."
"That was from Athens to Sparta," explained Christine," explained Christine, "the Ghent
to Aix journey was a-horseback, and some thousand-odd years after."
Simile's still good," said Barney. "There's still a lot about this I do not
understand."
A masterpiece of understatement, if ever I heard one," laughed Jim.
"Well, let's work on it from that angle. Come on, gang, to the horse!"
"Now, "said Altas, "you will find that the best possible efficiency is ob-
tained when the currents in these two resistances are equal and opposite in
direction. That floats the whole tube on the system, and makes it possible
to run the tube without any external power source. It requires a starter-
source for aligning and for standby service, and for the initial surge; then
it is self-sustaining. Also the in-phase voltage cannot be better obtained
than by exciting the phasing anode with some of the main-line power. That
must always be correctly phased. We now need the frequency generator no
longer, and by increasing the power rheostat to full, the tube will take up the
load. Watch the meters, and when they read full power, you may throw the
cut-over switch and make the tube self-sustaining. Our tower will then be in
perfect service, and you and I may return to our home below."
Than performed the operations, and then they left, taking the old tube
with them.
And on Terra, Sargon of Akkad watched ten thousand slaves carry stone
for one of his public buildings. He did not know that on one of the stars
placed in the black bowl of the evening sky for his personal benefit, men were
flinging more power through the air than the total output of all of his slaves
combined. Had he been told, he would have had the teller beheaded for
lying because Sargon of Akkad couldn't possibly have understood it——
"You know, we're missing a bet," said Jim. "This in-phase business here.
Why shouldn't we hang a bit of the old wall-socket juice in here?"
"That might be the trick," said Barney.
Jim made the connections, and they watched the meters read up and up
and up——and from the street below them a rumbling was heard. Smoke issued
from a crevasse in the pavement, and then with a roar, the street erupted and
a furrow three feet wide and all the way across the street from Jim Baler's
residence to Barney Carroll's garage lifted out of the ground. It blew straight
up and fell back, and from the bottom of the furrow the smoldering of
burned and tortured wiring cast a foul smell.
"Wham!" said Barney, looking at the smoking trench. "What was that?"
"I think we'll find that it was the closest connection between our places
made by the Electric Co.," said Jim.
"But what have we done?"
"I enumerate," said Christine. counting off on her fingers. "We've blasted
in the façade of City Hall. We've caused a couple of emergency flier-
landings within the city limits. We've blown fuses and circuit breakers all
the way from here to the main powerhouse downtown. We've stalled a few
dozen automobiles. We've torn or burned or cut the end off of one hammer
and have fractured the wall with it . . . where did that go, anyway, the
hammerhead? We've burned the wallpaper. We've run our electric bill up to
about three hundred dollars, I'll bet. We've bunged up a dozen meters. And
now we've ripped up a trench in the middle of the street."
"Somewhere in this set-up, there is a return circuit," said Jim thoughtfully.
"We've been taking power out of the line, and I've been oblivious of the
fact that a couple of hundred amperes is too high to get out of our power
line without trouble. What we've been doing is taking enough soup out of
the public utility lines to supply the losses only. The power we've been
seeing on our meters is the build-up, recirculated!"
"Huh?"
"Sure. Say we ring an amp in from the outside and shoot it across the
street. It goes to the wires and comes back because of some electrical urge
in our gadgets here, and then goes across the street inphase with the original.
That makes two amps total crossing our beam. The two come back and we
have two plus two. Four come back, and we double again and a gain until
the capacity of our device is at saturation. All we have to do is to find the
ground-return and hang a load in there. We find the transmitter-load input,
and supply that with a generator. Brother, we can beam power all the way
from here to Canalopsis on one relay tower!"
Barney looked at his friend. "Could be."
"Darned right. What other item can you think of that fits this tower any
better? We've run down a dozen ideas, but this works. We may be arrested
for wrecking Lincoln Head, but we'll get out as soon as this dingbat hits the
market. Brother, what a find!"
"Fellows, I think you can make your announcement now," smiled Chris-
tine. "They won't burn you at the stake if you can bring electric power on
a beam of pure nothing. This time you've hit the jackpot!"
It is six thousand Terran Years since Sargon of Akkad held court that
was lighted by torch. It is six thousand years, Terran, since Than and Altas
replaced the link in a power system that tied their cities together.
It is six thousand years since the beam tower fell into the Red Desert and
the mighty system of beamed power became lost as an art. But once again
the towers dot the plains, not of Mars, but of Venus and Terra, too.
And though they are of a language understood by the peoples of three
worlds, the manuals of instruction would be as cryptic to Than as his
manual was to Barney Carroll and Jim Baler.
People will never learn.
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. 196 - 206
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