Venus Equilateral
By George O. Smith
Illustrations by
SOL LEVIN
Introduction by JOHN W. CAMPBELL, JR.
THE PRIME PRESS
Philadelphia
1949
[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Copyright 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945
by Street and Smith for
Astounding Science Fiction
Copyright 1947 by
THE PRIME PRESS
First printing, 1947
Reprinted, 1949
THE PRIME PRESS
Box 2019—Philadelphia 3, Pa.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES
Dedication:
To James Clerk Maxwell, whose Electromagnetic
Equations founded the art of electronics and
thus made Venus Equilateral possible....
And to my son, George O. Smith (Jg),
who may some day work there.
CONTENTS
| QRM—INTERPLANETARY |
| CALLING THE EMPRESS |
| RECOIL |
| OFF THE BEAM |
| THE LONG WAY |
| BEAM PIRATE |
| FIRING LINE |
| SPECIAL DELIVERY |
| PANDORA'S MILLIONS |
| MAD HOLIDAY |
INTRODUCTION
Sometimes it's a little hard to get people to realize that not only hasthe world changed in the past, but that it is changing now, and willchange in the future. In fact, it takes something on the order of anatomic bomb to blast them out of their congenital complacency.
And it took the literally shocking violence of the atomic bomb to makethe general public understand the fact that science-fiction is not"pseudo-science" (that's what you find in Sunday Supplements—fiction,pretending to be science) but an entirely different breed ofthing—fiction stories based on science, and attempting to extrapolatethe curves of past development into future years. On August 6, 1945,people suddenly discovered that that fool fantasy stuff about atomicbombs hadn't been quite so fantastic as they had—well, to be brutallyfrank, hoped.
Their immediate reactions were that a good guess or two, a chance,coincidental correspondence between fiction-fantasy and fact, didn'tmean much. Still, relatively few people have learned to understand howscience-fiction originates—why it does successfully predict.
The answer is, actually, that science-fiction's prophecy is to a largeextent phony. It isn't prophecy at all, not in the true sense. It'smore like the astronomer's prophecy that there will be an eclipse ofthe sun visible for so many seconds, on such and such a day, a