A Treasury of Great Science Fiction Vol 2 Part 23

LOST ART.

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 edification 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 thousand years before Christ and was now but a memory and a wealth of picto-graphs that adorned the semipreserved Temples of Ca.n.a.lopsis.

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 pa.s.s upon your proficiency."

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 steppedCopyright 1943 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

Reprinted from Astounding Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

back and said: "There-and believe it or not, this is the first time you have permitted me to work with one of the beam 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 Baler 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 the wing surface. They were hitting it up at almost a thousand miles per hour on their way from Ca.n.a.lopsis to Lincoln Head; their trip would take an hour and a half.

As they pa.s.sed 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 of 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 leveled 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 experiencegained 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 the 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 Ca.n.a.lopsis-that little house on the top of the spire with the three-foot runway around it; then this 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 ours do," suggested 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 slide. 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 mathematics. Hard to tell, of course, but we've established the fact that mathematics 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 pa.s.sed 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 exceptfor 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 that 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 place the table of integrals at the last part of the math section. The geometry and trig is absolutely recognizable because of the designs. So is the solid geom and the a.n.a.lyt for the same reason.

The next section seems to be devoted to chemistry; the Martians used a hexagonal figure for a benzene ring, too, and so that's established. From that we find the key to the Periodic Chart of the Atoms which is run vertically instead of horizontally, but still unique. These guys were sharp, though; they seem to have hit upon the fact that isotopes are separate elements though so close in grouping to one another that they exhibit the same properties. Finding this will uncover a lot of 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 Plank'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 deflection 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 that 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; resistance 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 a.s.sume that their standard is the same as ours?"

"Better," said Barney. "The Terran Standard 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 a.s.sume their standard is the same?"

"Simple," said Barney in a cheerful tone. "Thank G.o.d 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 d.i.n.ky 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 sign that seems to signify '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 drivers we use in our s.p.a.ceships and driver-wing fliers."

"Yeah," drawled Jim. "About the same recognition as the difference between 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, tetrodes, 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," complained 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 deflection anodes."

"I'll get the equipment," said Than. "I forgot that part."

"Never mind the equipment," smiled 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 acc.u.mulative effect cannot be dangerous, though if the deflection plates are not properly served with their supply voltages, the experiment 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."