Three stories from Venus Equilateral by George O. Smith

My copy, front

On the occasion of George O. Smith's recent birthday, people on twitter were praising Smith's work, so I decided to read the first three stories in my 1967 paperback copy of Venus Equilateral, which has an intro by John W. Campbell, Jr. and a foreword by Arthur C. Clarke.  Venus Equilateral first appeared in 1947 in hardcover; all the stories in this book were first printed in Campbell's Astounding.  A quick glance at the magazines indicates that the three stories we are talking about today were revised for book publication, I guess in part to make them flow a little bit more like a novel, with events in later stories foreshadowed in earlier ones.  One-page italicized interludes also appear in this book that help to link the stories.

(There are ten stories in this book--it seems that an additional three stories about the eponymous space station are included in a later edition published in the 1970s under the title The Complete Venus Equilateral.) 

"QRM--Interplanetary" (1942)

It is the future!  Man has colonized Mars and Venus, and so communications must be maintained between the three planets. Because the sun often lies between any two of these three worlds, a space station known as Venus Equilateral has been put into orbit around the sun at a point equally distant from both Venus and Sol--this point is on Venus's orbit, sixty degrees ahead of the planet--to relay messages between the planets when necessary, which is often.  The three-mile-long, one-mile-in-diameter station has a population of almost 2,700 people and spins to create gravity--people's apartments are on the inner side of the station's outer surface, heavy machinery is concentrated in the low gee center.

Much of "QRM--Interplanetary" is taken up with descriptions of and dialogue about all the science and engineering related to the station--this is the kind of SF that tries to educate you about the hard sciences and glorifies the scientist and the engineer.  The plot of the story is like something you might see in an episode of M*A*S*H* and mostly exists to provide reasons for Dr. Dan Channing, an engineer, to explain to a dolt (and incidentally us readers) all about the space station's systems.

Channing has been acting director of the station for some months, since the last director got sick.  As the story begins the new director has arrived and taken up the position Channing so enjoyed (in part because the director's secretary is sexy Arden Westland), demoting Channing to his previous position as head of the Electronics Department.  The new director is Francis Burbank, a fat guy, a teetotaler, and a businessman; this political appointee has given the task by "the Commission" of making Venus Equilateral more profitable by cutting expenses.  Burbank also takes it upon himself  to elevate the moral environment on the station.  To these ends, a tax is placed on candy and cigarettes, the movies are censored to remove scenes of sex and violence, and the policy of allowing crew members to send messages and receive packages free of charge is ended. 

Burbank introduces automation to the aiming of the high frequency transmission beams so that some of the crew can be laid off to save on labor expenses, but these changes result in many messages failing to reach their intended recipients.  He tries to narrow the beams and reduce the use of redundant beams to save energy, another mistake that leads to lost messages.  Channing points out the folly of all his schemes and when he gets particularly annoyed with him actually punches Burbank in the face.  When Burbank, out of ignorance, destroys the station's oxygen-generation system (a room full of Martian weeds) and puts the lives of everybody on the Venus Equilateral at risk, the Commission sacks him and gives the Directorship to Channing on a permanent basis.  Capping off the story, Arden Westland agrees to marry Channing.

The technical stuff in the story is all interesting, but the human story is perhaps a little weak.  Maybe now that the scene is set and we have learned all about how the station works the rest of the stories will have better plots?

Besides in all the collections of Venus Equilateral stories, "QRM--Interplanetary" can be found in quite a few anthologies, including one edited by Richard Curtis called Future Tense and several celebrating Astounding and its successor Analog.

"Calling the Empress" (1943)

The Empress of Kolain lifts off from Mars carrying not only a bunch of wealthy passengers, but a cargo of plants bound for Venus.  (Apparently they have awesome plants on Mars.)  Just after the Empress has blasted off, Mars receives a message--there is a plague on Venus so the Empress will be quarantined when it lands!  Those valuable plants can only survive on board a ship for a set number of days, and they are going to die if the ship sits sealed up at the Venus spaceport for the period the quarantine requires!  The Empress could change course for Earth to save the plants, but she is already out of radio range of Mars, so there is no way to tell her to do so!  As Director of Venus Equilateral Don Channing and the head of the Communications Department, Walt Franks, explain to Arden Westland, Channing's fiance and secretary, "I don't know whether we can contact a ship in space.  It hasn't been done to date, you know, except for short distances."  Spaceships, moving at incredible speeds in the vast volumes of empty space, are very hard to spot, and don't carry the kind of equipment needed to read the communication beams the station regularly directs at Mars, Venus and Earth.

Channing and Franks are given the job of being the first to communicate with a spaceship in transit.  They do a lot of math stuff that is totally beyond me, like "sketching conical sections," and then draw designs for a cam and have the mechanical department build it--the Empress is too far away to be detected, but its location relative to Venus Equilateral can be predicted based on its expected speed and course and expressed as an angular distance from Mars; if the communications apparatus is aimed at Mars in the conventional fashion the cam (rotated by a clock mechanism) can be engaged to correct the projector's aim so that the beam falls where the Empress should be.  And that is just the beginning of the science lectures and jury-rigging with bread boards, files, hacksaws and thyratrons (or is it "thyratons?") that make up "Calling the Empress," which has even less human drama than "QRM--Interplanetary."  Smith doesn't even gin up tension by having Channing and Franks racing against time to save a million lives by winning a war or stopping a collision--they are racing against time to save some businesspeople a few bucks!     

My copy, back

The most human part of the story comes at the very end.  Once they have finally devised a way to project a beam on the Empress, Franks and Channing flick it on and off to send a Morse code message.  But this is the future--not many people know Morse code.  A call goes out throughout the ship--does anybody on the Empress know Morse code?  A thirteen-year-old nerd pipes us, and he becomes a hero to everybody who cares about Martian plants!

This is a fun story if you care about science at all, as it considers the implications of the vast distances and speeds involved in interplanetary travel.  It also contains knowing references to SF magazines (e. g., one character jocularly says "Clear ether!", a phrase from E. E. Smith's Lensmen stories), in-jokes that Astounding readers would presumably have enjoyed.

"Calling the Empress" only ever appeared in George O. Smith collections after its debut in Astounding, and the same is true for "Recoil," the next Venus Equilateral story.

"Recoil" (1943)

"Recoil" was the cover story for the issue of Astounding in which it appeared.

Trying to flesh out his characters a bit, in this story Smith puts forward the idea (in the mouth of Walt Franks's secretary) that Dan Channing and Franks are a symbiotic pair, the sum of whom are greater than the parts, because they have complementary skills and knowledge bases and because each is prone to flights of fancy that the other can rein in.

Thanks to Channing and Franks's inventiveness in the last story, planets and space stations can now send messages to space ships at great distances as long as the ships stay on their plotted courses and at their standard speeds.  But sometimes ships have to dodge meteors, and so they are not where they are expected to be and can't receive the messages.  While newlyweds Don and Arden Channing are on their honeymoon on Mars, Franks takes it upon himself to build a prototype electron cannon housed in a gun turret that he hopes will be able to blast apart meteors, but his first attempt is a failure.

As luck would have it, mere days after the test firing of the electron gun fails, a mad scientist and convicted murderer who escaped from death row and vanished ten years ago reappears on the scene, threatening to interdict all interplanetary travel with his armed space ships if he is not paid protection money.  Seeking to control interplanetary communications, he demands Venus Equilateral be handed over to him--he gives the station crew five days in which to make up their minds before he starts shooting.  Don and Arden Channing blast off from Mars in their little space ship, slip through the pirates' blockade and make a desperate landing inside the station, where Channing schools Franks (and me!) on betatrons and oscillators and electromagnetic deflection.  (I had had no idea that the supply of a betatron was sinusoidal!  Where have I been living?)  Before the five days are up Channing and Franks have the new and improved version of Franks's electron gun up and running and blast the three pirate ships into submission.  But the weapon isn't suitable for use in shooting down meteors, as the titanic electrical forces it generates when firing play havoc with the rest of the station's systems (this is the recoil of the title.)

Because of the high stakes and the scenes of the Channings' crash landing and the pirates suffering under the fire of history's first energy weapon, "Recoil" is the most thrilling of the stories we are reading today.

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These are very science-forward stories; I certainly learned about a bunch of stuff with the "-tron" suffix (though none will replace "Ladytron" in my heart.)  The speculations about life and travel in space are interesting, and the optimistic can-do attitude is a change of pace from the evil, death and heartbreak that suffuses so much of what I read.  I enjoyed these stories enough that I will be returning to Venus Equilateral, but it's back to fear and blood for the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.