"Smith, George - Complete Venus Equilateral" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Guy N)

Though there had been many tales about "space stations" long before the Venus Equilateral series (Murray Leninster's "Power Planet" is a classic example from the early Thirties), George Smith was probably the first writerЧcertainly die first technically qualified writerЧ to spell out their uses for space communications. It is therefore quite possible that these stories influenced me subconsciously when, at Stratford-on-Avon during the closing months of the war, I worked out the principles of synchronous communications satellites now embodied in the global Intelsat system. Appropriately enough, the person who pointed this out to me is another longtime science-fiction fan: Dr. John Pierce, instigator of the Bell Laboratories program that led to Echo and Tel-star.
It is interesting to see how George and I, who consider ourselves imaginative characters, both failed to anticipate the truly fantastic technical advances of the last few decades. We both thought that our "extraterrestrial relays" would be large, manned structures carrying armies of engineersЧas, indeed, will one day be the case. Neither of us dreamed that most of the things we described would be doneЧwithin twenty years!Чby a few pounds of incredibly miniaturized electronic equipment. And neither of us could possibly have foreseen the maser, that wonderful amplifying device which has made communication over "merely" planetary distances almost laughably simple.
Nevertheless, the problem which George Smith set out to solve remains, and will probably always remain. For short but annoyingЧand therefore intolerableЧ periods of time, the sun will block communications between planets and spacecraft Some kind of repeater
station will therefore be necessary to bypass signals around this miUion-mile-diameter obstacle.
Perhaps it will not be where George placed it, equidistant from Venus and the sun; for numerous reasons, a relay in Earth orbit, leading or trailing our planet by a constant few million miles, might be preferable. It is true that such a position would not be dynamically stable, but then I have always had doubts concerning the long-term stability of Venus Equilateral. Even mighty Jupiter cannot stop his "Trojan" asteroids from drifting back and forth over hundreds of millions of miles of orbit, and anything that approached Earth as closely as Venus Equilateral would be violently perturbed by our planet's gravitational field. However, such wanderings would be of little practical importance, and if necessary could be corrected rather easily by modest amounts of rocket power. Witness the ease with which today's synchronous satellites are kept on station over fixed lines of longitude, at the cost of a few pounds of fuel per year.
There is another respect in which George Smith, I am sure, correctly anticipates the future. Large, manned space stations will certainly not be used merely for communications. They will open up unlimitedЧliterallyЧ vistas for scientific research, technology, medicine, tourism, manufacturing, and even sport. Though not all the eventful happenings of the following space opera will actually materialize, you can be sure that still more surprising ones will.
And I hope that George and I are still around, another thirty years from now, to see how unimaginative we both were.
Colombo Sri Lanka February 1976
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
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Venus Equilateral Relay Station, to give it the full name, was a manned satellite that occupied the libration point sixty degrees ahead of Venus along the planet's orbit. It relayed radio messages among the three inner planets when the sun intervened.
Its usefulness was often misunderstood, since many persons think that the intervention of the sun means the physical presence of the obscuring mass dead in line. This is not so. The sun is a tremendous generator of radiothermal noise, and since communication fails when the signal-to-noise ratio becomes untenable, the relay station becomes useful or at least expedient, long before and long after solar syzygy.
Venus Equilateral and the persons who worked there were first reported as fiction in 1942 in Astounding Science Ficf/on under the title "QRMЧInterplanetary," the QRM signal being wireless telegraphers' code, meaning, "I am being interfered with." The report was popular; this was the beginning of a series that ran for three years and through thirteen novelettes.
QRMЧInternational Code signal meaning "interference" of controllable nature, such as man-made static, cross modulation from another channel adjoining, or willful obliteration of signals by an interfering source.
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Interference not of natural sources such as electrical storms, common static, et cetera. (Designated by International Code as QRN.)
ЧHandbook, Interplanetary Amateur Radio League
QRM- INTERPLANETARY
Korvus, the Magnificent, Nilamo of Yoralen, picked up the telephone in his palace and said: "I want to talk to Wilneda. He is at the International Hotel in Detroit, Michigan."
'Tm sorry, sir,** came the voice of the operator. "Talking is not possible, due to the fifteen-minute transmission lag between here and Terra. However, teletype messages are welcome."
Her voice originated fifteen hundred miles north of Yoralen, but it sounded as though she might be in the next room. Korvus thought for a moment and then said: "Take this message: 'Wilneda: Add to order for mining machinery one type 56-XXD flier to replace washed-out model And remember, alcohol and energy will not mix!* Sign that Korvus."
"Yes, Mr. Korvus."
"Not misterl" yelled the monarch, **I am Korvus the Magnificent! I am Nilamo of Yoralen!"
"Yes, your magnificence," said the operator humbly. It was more than possible that she was stifling a laugh, which knowledge made the little man of Venus squirm in wrath. But there was nothing he could do about it, so he wisely said nothing.
To give Korvus credit, he was not a pompous little man. He was largeЧfor a VenusianЧwhich made him small according to the standards set up by the Terrestri-ans. He, as Nilamo of Yoralen, had extended the once-small kingdom outward to include most of the Palanor-
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tis Country, which extended from 23.0 degrees North Latitude to 61.7 degrees, and almost across the whole, single continent that was the dry land of Venus.
So Korvus' message to Terra zoomed across the fifteen hundred rocky miles of Palanortis to Northern Landing. It passed high across the thousand-foot-high trees and over the mountain ranges. It swept over open patches of water, and across intervening cities and towns. It went with the speed of light and in a tight beam from Yoralen to Northern Landing, straight as a die and with person-to-person clarity. The operator in the city that lay across the North Pole of Venus clicked on a teletype, reading back the message as it was printed.
Korvus told her: "That is correct'*
"The message will be in the hands of your representative Wilneda within the hour."
The punched tape from Operator No. 7's machine slid along the line until it entered a coupling machine.
The coupling machine worked furiously. It accepted the tapes from seventy operators as fast as they could set them. It selected die messages as they entered me machine, placing a mechanical preference upon whichever message happened to be ahead of the others on the moving tapes. The master tape moved continuously at eleven thousand words per minute, taking teletype messages from everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere of Venus to Terra and Mars. It was a busy machine; even at eleven thousand words per minute it often got hours behind.
The synchronous-keyed signal from the coupling machine left the operating room and went to the transmission room. It was amplified and sent out of the city to a small, squat building at the outskirts of Northern Landing. It was hurled at the sky out of a reflector antenna by a thousand-kilowatt transmitter.
The wave seared against the Venusian Heaviside Layer. It fought and it struggled. And, as is the case with strife, it lost heavily in the encounter. The beam was resisted fiercely. Infiltrations of ionization tore at the radio beam, stripping and trying to beat it down.
But man triumphed over nature. The megawatt of energy that came in a tight beam from the building at
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Northern Landing emerged from the Heaviside Layer as a weak, piffling signal. It wavered and it crackled. It wanted desperately to lie down and sleep. Its directional qualities were impaired, and it wobbled badly. It arrived at the relay station tired and worn.
One million watts of ultra-high frequency energy at the start, it was measurable hi microvolts when it reached a space station only five hundred miles above the city of Northern Landing.
The signal, as weak and as wobbly as it was, was taken in by eager receptors. It was amplified. It was dehashed, destaticked and deloused. And once again, one hundred decibels stronger and infinitely cleaner, the signal was hurled out on a tight beam from a gigantic parabolic reflector.
Across sixty-seven million miles of space went the signal. Across the orbit of Venus it went in a vast chord, and arrived at the Venus Equilateral Station with less trouble than the original transmission through tile Heaviside Layer. The signal was amplified and demodulated. It went into a decoupler machine where the messages were sorted mechanically and sent, each to the proper channel, into other coupler machines. Beams from Venus Equilateral were directed at Mars and at Terra.
The Terra beam ended at Luna. Here it again was placed in the two-compartment beam and from Luna it punched down at Terra's Layer, emerging into the atmosphere of Terra as weak and as tired as it had been when it had come out of the Venusian Heaviside Layer. It entered a station in the Bahamas, was stripped of the interference, and put upon the land beams. It entered decoupling machines that sorted the messages as to destination. These various beams spread out across the face of Terra, the one carrying Korvus' message finally coming into a station at Ten Mile Road and Woodward. From this station, at the outskirts of Detroit, it went upon land wires downtown to the International Hotel.
The teletype machine in the office of the hotel began
to click rapidly. The message to Wilneda was arriving.
And fifty-five minutes after the operator told Korvus
that less than an hour would ensue, Wilneda was saying,
humorously, "So, Korvus was drunk again hist nightЧ**
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Completion of Korvus* message to Wilneda completes also one phase of the tale at hand. It is not important. There were a hundred and fifty other messages that might have been accompanied hi the same manner, each as interesting to the person who likes the explanation of the interplanetary communication service. But this is not a technical journal. A more complete explanation of the various phases that a message goes through in leaving a city on Venus to go to Terra may be found in the Communications Technical Review, Volume XXVII, number 8, pages 411 to 716. Readers more interested in the technical aspects are referred to the article.
It so happens that Korvus' message was picked out of a hundred-odd messages because of one thing only. At the time that Korvus' message was in transit through the decoupler machines at the Venus Equilateral Relay Station, something of a material nature was entering the air lock of the station.
It was an unexpected visit