Beam Pirate

Illustrated by Alfred
Mark Kingman was in a fine state of nerves. He looked upon life and the people in it as one views the dark-brown taste of a hangover. It seemed to him at the present time that the Lord had forsaken him, for the entire and complete success of the solar beam had been left only to Venus Equilateral by a sheer fluke of nature. Certainly he, nor anyone else, could have foreseen the Channing Layer, that effectively blocked any attempt to pierce it with the strange, sub-level energy spectrum over which the driver tube and the power-transmission tube worked, representing the extremes of the so-called spectrum.
But Venus Equilateral, for their part, were well set. Ships plied the spaceways using their self-contained power only during atmospheric passage, and paid Venus Equilateral well for the privilege. The Relay Station itself was powered on the solar beam, and the costly shipments of potential power had been stopped. There were other relay stations that belonged to the communications company; Luna, Deimos and Phobos, and the six that circled Venus in lieu of a satellite; all were powered by the solar beam. And the solar observatory on Mercury used but little power, so the needs of the observatory became the sole income for Terran Electric's planetary rights of the solar beam, since Mercury owned no air of its own.
Mark Kingman was beginning to feel the brunt of Channing's statement to the effect that legal-minded men were of little importance when it came to the technical life in space, where men's lives and livelihood depended more on technical skill than upon the legal pattern set for their protection in the complex society of planetary civilization.
It seemed that way. For instead of gaining their ends by legal restrictions on the power-transmission tube investigations, Terran Electric had lost their chance. Venus Equilateral had the legal right to tinker with the transmission tubes all they wanted to, and in return, Terran Electric held all of the planetary rights to Venus Equilateral's solar beam—which in the domain covered by natural celestial bodies was about as valuable as the gold-mining rights to the crater Tycho.