By RANDALL GARRETT
Illustrated by RICHARD KLUGA
The "technical difficulties" on Satellite
Four became a menace to the entire Earth!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity January 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
CHAPTER I
The big building stood out at night, even among the other toweringspires of Manhattan. The bright, glowing symbol on its roof attractedthe attention of anyone who looked up at the night sky of New York; andfrom the coast of Connecticut, across Long Island Sound, the huge ballwas easily visible as a shining dot of light.
The symbol—as a symbol—resembled the well-known symbol of anatom. It consisted of a central globe surrounded by a swarm ofswiftly-moving points of light that circled the glowing sphereendlessly. It represented the Earth itself and the robot-operatedartificial satellites that whirled around it. It was the trademark ofCircum-Global Communications.
But it was more than just a symbol; it was also the antenna for thepowerful transmitters that kept constant contact with the satelliterelay stations which, in turn, re-broadcast the TV impulses to allparts of the globe.
Inside the CGC Building, completely filling the upper twenty floors,were the sections of the vast electronic brain that computed andintegrated the orbits of the small artificial moons and kept thecommunication beams linked to them. And below the brain, occupyinganother four floors, were the control and monitoring rooms, in whichthe TV communications of a world were selected and programmed.
In Johannesburg, South Africa, the newly-elected President spoke infront of a TV camera. His dark, handsome face was coldly implacableas he said: "They wanted apartheid when they were in power; wesee no reason to believe they have changed their minds. They wantedapartheid—very well, they shall continue to have apartheid!"
His image and his voice, picked up by the camera and mike, weretransmitted by cable to the beam broadcaster in the old capital ofPretoria. From there, it was broadcast generally all over South Africa;at the same time, it was relayed by tight beam to Satellite Nine,which happened to be in the sky over that part of the Earth at thattime.
Satellite Nine, in turn, relayed it to all the other satellites in lineof sight. Satellite Two, over the eastern seaboard of North America,picked it up and automatically relayed it to the big antenna on top ofNew York's Circum-Global Communications Building.
There it was de-hashed and cleaned up. The static noise which it hadpicked up in its double flight through the ionosphere was removed; theperiods of fading were strengthened, and the whole communication wassmoothed out and patched up.
From the CGC Building, it was re-broadcast over the United States.A man in Bismarck, North Dakota, looked at the three-dimensional,full-color image of the President of South Africa, listened to hisclear, carefully-modulated words, and said: "Serves 'em right, byGeorge!"
Besides the world-wide television news and entertainment networks, CGCalso handled person-to-person communication through its subsidiary,Intercontinental Visiphone. If the man in Bismarck had wanted to callthe President of the Union of South Africa, his visiphone message wouldhave gone out in almost exactly the same way, and the two men couldhave talked person-to-person, face to face. (Whether the President ofSouth Africa would have accepted the call or not is another matter.)
From all over the world, pr