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Ebook has 494 lines and 14023 words, and 10 pages

"Let Kingman try and find a precedent for that. Brother Blackstone himself would be stumped to make a ruling. We'll have to go to work with the evidence as soon as we get a glimmer of the possibilities. But I think we have a good chance. We can diddle up the focus, I'm certain."

Walt grinned. "I'd try to keep you from being lonely, but I'm in this too, and besides, you're my friend's best wife."

"Shall we drag that around a bit? I think we could kill a couple of hours with it sometime."

"Let it lie there and rot," snorted Channing cheerfully. "We'll pick it up later. Come on, Walt. We've got work to do."

Mark Kingman glowered at the 'gram and swore under his breath. He wondered whether he might be developing a persecution complex; it seemed as though every time he turned around, Venus Equilateral was in his hair, asking for something or other. And he was not in any position to quibble about it. Kingman was smart enough to carry his tray very level. Knowing that they were waiting for a chance to prove that he had been connected with the late Hellion Murdoch made him very cautious. There was no doubt in any mind that Murdoch was written off the books. But whether Murdoch had made a sufficiently large impression on the books of Terran Electric to have the connection become evident--that worried Kingman.

So he swore at each telegram that came in, and then sent the desired object out with the next ship. Compared to his former attitude toward Venus Equilateral, Mark Kingman was behaving like an honor student in a Sunday school.

Furthermore, behaving himself did not make him feel good.

He punched the buzzer, told his secretary to call in the shop foreman, and then sat back and wondered about the 'gram.

He was still wondering when the man entered. Kingman looked up and fixed his superintendent with a fish glance. "Horman, can you guess why the Venus Equilateral crowd would want two dozen gauge blocks?"

"Sure. We use Johannson Blocks all the time."

"Channing wants twenty-four blocks. All three inches on a side--cubes. Square to within thirty seconds of angle, and each of the six faces optically flat to one quarter wave length of Cadmium light."

"They're quite lenient," said Kingman bitterly. "A full wave length!"

"White of them," grunted Horman. "I suppose the same thing applies?"

"We're running over thin ice," said Kingman reflectively. "I can't afford to play rough. We'll make up their blocks."

"I wonder what they want 'em for."

"Something tricky, I'll bet."

"But what could you use two dozen gauge blocks for? All the same size."

"Inspection standards?" asked Kingman.

"Not unless they're just being difficult. You don't put primary gauges on any production line. You make secondary gauges for production line use and keep a couple of primaries in the check room to try the secondaries on. In fact, you usually have a whole set of gauge blocks to build up to any desired dimension so that you don't have to stock a half-million of different sizes."

"It's possible that they may be doing something extremely delicate?"

"Possible," said Horman slowly. "But not too probable. On the other hand, I may be one hundred percent wrong. I don't know all the different stuff a man can make, by far. My own experience indicates that nothing like that would be needed. But that's just one man's experience."

"Channing and that gang of roughneck scientists have been known to make some fancy gadgets," said Kingman grudgingly.

"If you'll pardon my mentioning the subject," said Horman in a scathing tone, "you'd have been far better off to tag along with 'em instead of fighting 'em."

"I'll get 'em yet!"

"What's it got you so far?"

"I'm not too bad off. I've come up from the assistant chief legal counsel of Terran Electric to controlling the company."

"And Terran Electric has slid down from the topmost outfit in the system to a seventh rater."

"We'll climb back. At any rate, I'm better off personally. You're better off personally. In fact, everybody that had enough guts to stay with us is better off."

"Yeah--I know. It sounds good on paper. But make a bum move again, Kingman, and we'll all be in jail. You'd better forget that hatred against Venus Equilateral and come down to earth."

"Well, I've been a good boy for them once. After all, I did point out the error in their patent on the solar beam."

"That isn't all. Don't forget that Terran Electric's patent was at error too."

"Frankly it was a minor error. It's one of those things that is easy to get caught on. You know how it came about?"

"Nope. I accepted it just like everybody else. It took some outsider to laugh at me and tell me why."

Kingman smiled. "It's easy to get into easy thinking. They took power from Sirius--believe it or not--and then made some there-and-back time measurements and came up with a figure that was about the square of one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second. But you know that you can't square a velocity and come up with anything that looks sensible. The square of a velocity must be some concept like an expanding area."

"Or would it be two spots diverging along the sides of a right angle?" queried Horman idly. "What was their final answer?"

"The velocity of light is a concept. It is based on the flexibility of space--its physical constants, so to speak. Channing claims that the sub-etheric radiation bands of what we have learned to call the driver radiation propagates along some other medium than space itself. I think they were trying to establish some mathematical relation--which might be all right, but you can't establish that kind of relation and hope to hold it. The square of C in meters comes out differently than the square of C in miles, inches, or a little-used standard, the light-second, in which the velocity of light is unity, or One. Follow? Anyway, they made modblation equipment of some sort and measured the velocity and came up with a finite figure which is slightly less than the square of one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second. Their original idea was wrong. It was just coincidence that the two figures came out that way. Anyway," smiled Kingman, "I pointed it out to them and they quick changed their patent letters. So, you see, I've been of some help."

"Nice going. Well, I'm going to make those gauges. It'll take us one long time, too. Johannson Blocks aren't the easiest thing in the world to make."

"What would you make secondary standards out of?"

"We use glass gauges, mostly. They don't dinge or bend when dropped--they go to pieces or not at all. We can't have a bent gauge rejecting production parts, you know, and steel gauges can be bent. Besides, you can grind glass to a half wave length of light with ease, but polishing steel is another item entirely."

"I'm going to call Channing and ask him about glass blocks. It may be that he might use them. Plus the fact that I may get an inkling of the ultimate use. They have no production lines running on Venus Equilateral, have they?"

"Nope. Not at all. They're not a manufacturing company."

"Well, I'm going to call."

Kingman's voice raced across Terra to Hawaii, went on the communications beams of the sky-pointing reflectors, and rammed through the Heaviside Layer to Luna. At the Lunar Station, his voice was mingled in multiplex with a thousand others and placed on the sub-ether beams to Venus Equilateral.

Don Channing answered the 'phone. "Yes?"

"Kingman, Dr. Channing."

Don grunted. He did not care to be addressed by title when someone who disliked him did it. His friends did not, and Kingman's use of the title made it an insult.

"Look," said Kingman, "what do you want to use those blocks for?"

"We've got a job of checking dimensions."

"Nothing more? Do you need the metal for electrical reasons?"

"No," said Don. "What have you in mind?"

"Our toolshop is nicely equipped to grind glass gauges. We can do that better than making Jo-blocks. Can you use glass ones?"

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