"She will, too," grinned Don. "Well, I'd like to toss her one back, but
she's got me there. I'll just fortify myself at the bar and think up a
few choice ones for when we hit Mojave."
"Some day you'll be able to answer those," promised the steward. "Mind
telling me why it's so tough?"
"Not at all," smiled Channing. "The problem is about the same as
encountered by the old-time cowboy. It's a lot easier to hit a man on
a moving horse from a nice, solid rock than it is to hit a man on a
nice, solid rock from a moving horse. Venus Equilateral is quite solid
as things go. But a spaceship's course is fierce. We're wobbling a few
milliseconds here and a few there, and by the time you use that arc to
swing a line of a hundred million miles, you're squirting quite a bit
of sky. We're tinkering with it right now, but so far we have come up
with nothing. Ah, well, since the human race got along without electric
lights for a few million years, we can afford to tinker with an idea
for a few months. Nobody is losing lives or sleep because we can't talk
to the boys back home."
"We've been hopping from planet to planet for quite a number of years
too," said the steward. "Quite a lot of them went by before it was even
possible to contact a ship in space."
"And that was done because of an emergency. Probably this other
thing will go on until we hit an emergency; then we shall prove that
old statement about a loaf of bread being the maternal parent of a
locomotive." Channing lit a cigarette, and puffed deeply. "Where do we
stand?"
"Thirty hours out," answered the steward. "About ready for turnover. I
imagine that the poor engineer's gang is changing cathodes about now."
"It's a long drag," said Channing. He addressed himself to his glass
and began to think of a suitable answer for his wife's latest thrust.
* * * * *
Bill Hadley, of the power engineer's gang, spoke to the pilot's
greenhouse below the ship. "Hadley to pilot room: Cathodes 1 and 3
ready."
"Pilot Greenland to Engineer Hadley: Power fade-over from even to odd
now under way. Tubes 2 and 4 now dead; load on 1 and 3. You may enter 2
and 4."
"Check!"
Hadley cracked an air valve beside a circular air door. The hiss of
entering air crescendoed and died, and then Hadley cracked the door
that opened in upon the huge driver tube. With casual disregard for
the annular electrodes that filled the tube and the sudden death that
would come if the pilot sent the driving voltages surging into the
electrodes, Hadley climbed to the top of the tube and used a spanner to
remove four huge bolts. A handy differential pulley permitted him to
lower the near-exhausted cathode from the girders to the air door where
it was hauled to the deck. A fresh cathode was slung to the pulley and
hoisted to place. Hadley bolted it tight and clambered back into the
ship. He closed the air door and the valve, and then opened the valve
that led from the tube to outer space. The tube evacuated and Hadley
spoke once more to the pilot room.
"Hadley to Greenland: Tube 4 ready."
"Check."
The operation was repeated on Tube 2, and then Pilot Greenland said:
"Fade-back beginning. Power diminishing on 1 and 3, increasing on 2 and
4. Power equalized, acceleration 2-G as before. Deviation from norm:
two-tenths-G."
Hadley grinned at the crew. "You'd think that Greenland did all that
himself, the way he talks. If it weren't for autopilots, we'd have been
all over the sky."
Tom Bennington laughed. He was an old-timer, and he said in a
reminiscent tone: "I remember when we used to do that on manual. There
were as many cases of _mal de void_ during cathode change as during
turnover. Autopilots are the nuts--look! We're about to swing right
now, and I'll bet a fiver that the folks below won't know a thing about
it."
A coincidence of mammoth proportions occurred at precisely that
instant. It was a probability that made the chance of drawing a royal
flush look like the chances of tomorrow coming on time. It was, in
fact, one of those things that they said couldn't possibly happen,
which went to prove only how wrong they were. It hadn't happened yet
and probably wouldn't happen again for a million million years, but it
did happen once.
Turnover was about to start. A relay circuit that coupled the
meteor-spotter to the autopilot froze for a bare instant, and the
coincidence happened between the freezing of the relay contacts
and the closing of another relay whose purpose it was to shunt the
coupler circuits through another line in case of relay failure. In
the inconceivable short time between the failure and the device that
corrected failure, the _Solar Queen_ hit a meteor head on.
It is of such coincidences that great tragedies and great victories are
born.
* * * * *
The meteor, a small one as cosmic objects go, passed in through the
broad observation dome at the top of the ship. Unhampered, it zipped
through the central well of the _Solar Queen_ and passed out through
the pilot's greenhouse at the bottom of the ship. Its speed was nothing
worth noting; a scant twenty miles per second almost sunward. But the
eleven hundred miles per second of the _Solar Queen_ made the passage
of the meteor through the six hundred feet of the ship's length of less
duration than the fastest camera shutter.
In those microseconds, the meteor did much damage.
It passed through the main pilotroom cable and scrambled those circuits
which it did not break entirely. It tore the elevator system from
its moorings. It entered as a small hole in the observation dome and
left taking the entire pilot's greenhouse and all of the complex
paraphernalia with it.
The lines to the driver tubes were scrambled, and the ship shuddered
and drove forward at 10-G. An inertia switch tried to function, but the
resetting solenoid had become shorted across the main battery and the
weight could not drop.
Air doors clanged shut, closing the central well from the rest of the
ship and effectively sealing the well from the crew.
The lights in the ship flickered and died. The cable's shorted lines
grew hot and fire crept along its length and threatened the continuity.
The heat opened fire-quenching vents and a cloud of CO_{2}, emerged
together with some of the liquid gas itself. The gas quenched the
fire and the cold liquid cooled the cable. Fuses blew in the shorted
circuits--
And the _Solar Queen_ continued to plunge on and on at 10-G; the
maximum possible out of her driving system.
The only man who remained aware of himself aboard the _Solar Queen_ was
the man who was filled with gravanol and adhesive tape. No other person
expected to be hammered down by high acceleration. Only Channing, who
was planning to leave Terra in his own little scooter, was prepared to
withstand high G. He, with his characteristic hate of doing anything
slowly, was ready to make the Terra to Venus Equilateral passage at 5-
or 6-G.
It might as well have caught him, too. With all of the rest
unconscious, hurt, or dead, he was alone and firmly fastened to the
floor of the salon under eighteen hundred pounds of his own, helpless
weight.
And as the hours passed, the _Solar Queen_ was driving farther and
farther from the imaginary spot that was the focus of the communicator
beams from Venus Equilateral.
The newly-replaced cathodes in the driving tubes were capable of
driving the ship for about two hundred G-hours at 1-G, before
exhaustion to the point of necessary replacement for safety purposes.
The proportion is not linear, nor is it a square-law, but roughly it
lies in the region just above linear, so that the _Solar Queen_ drove
on and on through space for ten hours at 10-G before the cathodes died
for want of emitting surface. They died, not at once, but in irregular
succession so that when the last erg of power was gone from the ship
it was zooming on a straight line tangent from its point of collision
but rolling in a wild gyration through the void.
And twenty-five hundred miles per second added to her initial velocity
of eleven hundred miles per second added up to thirty-six hundred miles
per second. She should have had about seventy-five million miles to go
at 2-G, to reach Terra in thirty hours from the halfway point where she
turned ends to go into deceleration. Instead, the _Solar Queen_ after
ten hours of misdirected 10-G acceleration was thirty million miles on
her way, or about halfway to Terra. Three hours later, driving free,
the _Solar Queen_ was passing Terra, having missed the planet by a few
million miles.
Back in space, at an imaginary junction between the beams from Venus
Equilateral and the course registered for the _Solar Queen_, Arden
Channing's latest message was indicating all sorts of mild punishment
for her husband when she got him home.
By the time that the _Solar Queen_ should have been dropping out of
the sky at Mojave Spaceport, the ship would be one hundred and ninety
million miles beyond Terra and flirting with the imaginary line that
marked the orbit of Mars.
That would be in seventeen hours.
* * * * *
Weightless, Channing pursued a crazy course in the salon of the
spinning ship. He ached all over from the pressure, but the gravanol
had kept his head clear and the adhesive tape had kept his body intact.
He squirmed around in the dimness and could see the inert figures
of the rest of the people who had occupied the salon at the time of
the mishap. He became sick. Violence was not a part of Channing's
nature--at least he confined his violence to those against whom he
required defense. But he knew that many of those people who pursued
aimless orbits in the midair of the salon with him would never set foot
on solidness again.
He wondered how many broken bones there were among those who had lived
through the ordeal. He wondered if the medical staff of one doctor and
two nurses could cope with it.
Then he wondered what difference it made if they were to go on and on,
and from that thought came the one he should have thought of first: How
were they to stop going on and on? Channing had a rough idea of what
had happened. He knew something about the conditions under which they
had been traveling, how long, and in which direction. It staggered him,
the figures he calculated in his mind. It behooved him to do something.
He bumped an inert figure, and grabbed. One hand took the back of the
head and came away wet and sticky. Channing retched, and then threw
the inert man from him. He coasted back against a wall, and caught a
handrail. Hand-over-hand he went to the door and into the hall. Down
the hall he went to the passengers' elevator shaft and with no thought
of what his action would have been on any planet, Channing opened the
door and drove down the shaft for several decks. He emerged and headed
for the sick ward.
He found the doctor clinging to his operating table with his knees and
applying a bandage to one of his nurses' heads.
"Hello, Doc," said Channing. "Help?"
"Grab Jen's feet and hold her down," snapped the doctor.
"Bad?" asked Don as he caught the flailing feet.
"Seven stitches, no fracture," said the doctor.
"How's the other one?"
"Unconscious, but unharmed. Both asleep in bed, thank God. So was I.
Where were--? You're Channing and were all doped up with gravanol and
adhesive. Thank yourself a god for that, too. I'm going to need both of
my nurses and we'll all need you."
"Hope I can do some good," said Don.
"You'd better. Or any good I can do will be wasted. Better start right
now. Here," the doctor produced a set of keys, "these will unlock
anything in the ship but the purser's safe. You'll need 'em. Now get
along and do something and leave the body-mending to me. Scram!"
"Can you make out all right?"
"As best I can. But you're needed to get us help. If you can't, no man
in the Solar System can. You're in the position of a man who can not
afford to help in succoring the wounded and dying. It'll be tough, but
there it is. Get cutting. And for Heaven's sake, get us two things:
Light and a floor. I couldn't do more than slap on tape whilst floating
in air. See you later, Channing, and good luck."
The nurse squirmed, groaned, and opened her eyes. "What happened?" she
asked, blinking into the doctor's flashlight.
"Tell you later, Jen. Get Fern out of her coma in the ward and then
we'll map out a plan. Channing, get out of here!"
Channing got after borrowing a spare flashlight from the doctor.
* * * * *
He found Hadley up in the instrument room with a half dozen of his men.
They were a mass of minor and major cuts and injuries, and were working
under a single incandescent lamp that had been wired to the battery
direct by means of spare cable. The wire went snaking through the air
in a foolish, crooked line, suspended on nothing. Hadley's gang were
applying first aid to one another and cursing the lack of gravity.
"Help?" said Channing.
"Need it or offer it?" asked Hadley with a smile.
"Offer it. You'll need it."
"You can say that again--and then pitch in. You're Channing, of
Communications, aren't you? We're going to have a mad scramble on
the main circuits of this tub before we can unwind it. I don't think
there's an instrument working in the whole ship."
"You can't unravel the whole works, can you?"
"Won't try. About all we can do is replace the lighting system and hang
the dead cathodes in again. They'll be all right to take us out of this
cockeyed skew-curve and probably will last long enough to keep a half-G
floor under us for tinkering, for maybe forty or fifty hours. Assistant
Pilot Darlange will have to learn how to run a ship by the seat of his
pants--as far as I can guess there isn't even a splinter of glass left
in the pilot room--so he'll have to correct this flight by feel and by
using a haywire panel."
"Darlange is a school-pilot," grinned one of Hadley's men.
"I know, Jimmy, but I've seen him work on a bum autopilot, and he
can handle haywire all right. It'll be tough without Greenland, but
Greenland--" Hadley let the sentence fall; there was no need to mention
the fact that Greenland was probably back there with the rest of the
wreckage torn from the _Solar Queen_.
Jimmy nodded, and the action shook him from his position. He grabbed at
a roll of tape that was floating near him and let it go with a laugh as
he realized it was too light to do him any good.
"Too bad that this gyration is not enough to make a decent gravity
at the ends, at least," snorted Hadley. He hooked Jimmy by an arm and
hauled the man back to a place beside him. "Now look," he said, "I
can't possibly guess how many people are still in working condition
after this. Aside from our taped and doped friend here, the only ones
I have are we who were snoozing in our beds when the crush came. I'll
bet a cooky that the rest of the crowd are all nursing busted ribs,
and worse. Lucky that full-G died slowly as the cathodes went out;
otherwise we'd all have been tossed against the ceilings with bad
effects.
"Jimmy, you're a committee of one to roam the crate and make a list of
everyone who is still in the running and those who can be given minor
repairs to make them fit for limited work. Doc has a pretty good supply
of Stader splints; inform him that these are only to be used on men who
can be useful with them. The rest will have to take to plaster casts
and the old-fashioned kind of fracture-support.
"Pete, you get to the executive deck and tell Captain Johannson that
we're on the job and about to make with repairs. As power engineer,
I've control of the maintenance gang too, and we'll collect the whole,
hale, and hearty of Michaels' crew on our merry way.
"Tom, take three of your men and begin to unravel the mess with an eye
toward getting us lights.
"Tony, you can do this alone since we have no weight. You get the stale
cathodes from the supply hold and hang 'em back in the tubes.
"Channing, until we get a stable place, you couldn't do a thing about
trying to get help, so I suggest that you pitch in with Bennington,
there, and help unscramble the wiring. You're a circuit man, and though
power-line stuff is not your forte, you'll find that running a lighting
circuit is a lot easier than neutralizing a microwave transmitter. Once
we get light, you can help us haywire a control panel. Right?"
"Right. And as far as contacting the folks back home goes, we couldn't
do a darned thing until the time comes when we should be dropping in
on Mojave. They won't be looking for anything from us until we're
reported missing; then I imagine that Walt Franks will have everything
from a spinthariscope to a gold-foil electroscope set up. Right now I'm
stumped, but we have seventeen hours before we can start hoping to be
detected. Tom, where do we begin?"
Bennington smiled inwardly. To have Don Channing asking him for orders
was like having Captain Johannson request the batteryman's permission
to change course. "If you can find and remove the place where the
shorted line is, and then splice the lighting circuits again, we'll
have a big hunk of our work done. The rest of us will begin to take
lines off of the pilot's circuits right here in the instrument room so
that our jury-controls can be hooked in. You'll need a suit, I think,
because I'll bet a hat that the shorted line is in the well."
* * * * *
For the next five hours, the instrument room became a beehive of
activity. Men began coming in driblets, and were put to work as
they came. The weightlessness gave quite a bit of trouble; had the
instrument panels been electrically hot, it would have been downright
dangerous since it was impossible to do any kind of work without
periodically coming against bare connections. Tools floated around
the room in profusion, and finally Hadley appointed one man to do
nothing but roam the place to retrieve "dropped" tools. The soldering
operations were particularly vicious, since the instinctive act of
flinging excess solder from the tip of an iron made droplets of hot
solder go zipping around the room to splash against something, after
which the splashes would continue to float.
Men who came in seeking to give aid were handed tools and told to do
this or that, and the problem of explaining how to free a frozen relay
to unskilled help was terrific.
Then at the end of five hours, Channing came floating in to the
instrument room. He flipped off the helmet and said to Hadley: "Make
with the main switch. I think I've got it."
Throughout the ship the lights blinked on.
With the coming of light, there came hope also. Men took a figurative
hitch in their belts and went to work with renewed vigor. It seemed
as though everything came to a head at about this time, too. Hadley
informed Darlange that his jury-control was rigged and ready for
action, and about the same time, the galley crew came in with
slender-necked bottles of coffee and rolls.
"It was a job, making coffee," grinned the steward. "The darned stuff
wanted to get out of the can and go roaming all over the place. There
isn't a one of us that hasn't got a hot coffee scar on us somewhere.
Now if he"--nodding at Darlange--"can get this thing straightened out,
we'll have a real dinner."
"Hear that, Al? All that stands between us and dinner is you. Make with
the ship-straightening. Then we'll all sit around and wait for Channing
to think."
"Is the ship's communicator in working order?" asked Darlange.
"Sure. That went on with the lights."
Darlange called for everyone in the ship to hold himself down, and
then he tied his belt to the frame in front of the haywired panel. He
opened the power on drivers 1 and 2, and the ship's floor surged ever
so little.
"How're you going to know?" asked Hadley.
"I've got one eye on the gyro-compass," said Darlange. "When it stops
turning, we're going straight. Then all we have to do is to set our
bottom end along the line of flight and pack on the decel. Might as
well do it that way since every MPS we can lose is to our advantage."
He snapped switches that added power to Driver 3. Gradually the
gyro-compass changed from a complex rotation-progression to a simpler
pattern, and eventually the simple pattern died, leaving but one
freedom of rotation. "I'm sort of stumped," grinned Darlange. "We're
now hopping along, but rotating on our long axis. How we stop axial
rotation with drivers set parallel to that axis I'll never guess."
"Is there a lifeship in working order?" asked Hadley.
"Sure."
"Tom, turn it against the rotation and apply the drivers on that until
we tell you to stop."
An hour later the ship had ceased to turn. Then Darlange jockeyed the
big ship around so that the bottom was along the line of flight. Then
he set the power for a half-G, and everyone relaxed.
Ten minutes later Captain Johannson came in.
"You've done a fine job," he told Hadley. "And now I declare an hour
off for dinner. Dr. MacLain has got a working medical center with
the aid of a few people who understand how such things work, and the
percentage of broken bones, though terrific in number, is being taken
care of. The passengers were pretty restive at first, but the coming of
light seemed to work wonders. This first glimmer of power is another.
About nine or ten who were able to do so were having severe cases
of skysickness." He smiled ruefully. "I'm not too sure that I like
no-weight myself."
"Have you been in the observation dome?" asked Don.
"Yes. It's pierced, you know."
"Did the meteor hit the telescope?"
"No, why?"
"Because I'm going to have to get a sight on Venus Equilateral before
we can do anything. We'll have to beam them something, but I don't know
what right now."
"Can we discuss that over a dinner?" asked the captain. "I'm starved,
and I think that the rest of this gang is also."
"You're a man after my own heart," laughed Channing. "The bunch out
at the Station wouldn't believe me if I claimed to have done anything
without drawing it up on a tablecloth."
* * * * *
"Now," said Channing over his coffee. "What have we in the way of
electronic equipment?"
"One X-ray machine, a standard set of communicating equipment, one beam
receiver with 'type machine for collecting stuff from your Station, and
so on."
"You wouldn't have a betatron in the place somewhere?" asked Don
hopefully.
"Nope. Could we make one?"
"Sure. Have you got about ten pounds of No. 18 wire?"
"No."
"Then we can't."
"Couldn't you use a driver? Isn't that some kind of beam?"
"Some kind," admitted Channing. "But it emits something that we've
never been able to detect except in an atmosphere where it ionizes the
air into a dull red glow."
"You should have been wrecked on the _Sorcerer's Apprentice_," laughed
Hadley. "They're the guys who have all that kind of stuff."
"Have they?" asked Johannson.
"The last time I heard, they were using a large hunk of their upper
hull for a VanDerGraf generator."
"That would do it," said Channing thoughtfully. "But I don't think I'd
know how to modulate a VanDerGraf. A betatron would be the thing.
You can modulate that, sort of, by keying the input. She'd give out
with hundred-and-fifty-cycle stuff, but so what? We made the _Empress
of Kolain_ sit up and say uncle on hundred-cycle stuff. How much of a
trick is it to clear the observation dome from the top?"
"What do you intend to do?"
"Well, we've got a long, hollow tube in this ship. Knock out the
faceted dome above, and we can rig us up a huge electron gun. We'll
turn the ship to point at the Station and beam 'em a bouquet of
electrons."
"How're you going to do that?"
"Not too tough, I don't think. Down here," and Channing began to trace
on the tablecloth, "we'll put us a hot cathode. About this level we'll
hang the first anode, and at this level we'll put the second anode.
Here'll be an acceleration electrode, and up near the top we'll put
a series of focusing anodes. We'll tap in to the driver-tube supply
and take off voltages to suit us. Might use a tube at that, but the
conversion to make an honest electron gun out of it would disrupt our
power, and then it would be impossible to make a driver out of it again
without recourse to a machine shop."
"How are you going to make electrodes?"
"We'll use the annular gratings that run around the central well at
each level," said Channing. "We'll have a crew of men cut 'em free and
insulate the resulting rings with something. Got anything?"
"There is a shipment of methyl-methacrylate rods for the Venus Power
Co. in Hold 17," said the cargo master.
"Fine," said Channing. "What size?"
"Three inches by six feet."
"It'll be tricky work, and you'll have to wait until your cut edge has
cooled before you hook on the rods," mused Don. "But that's the ticket."
"Which floors do you want?"
"Have you got a scale drawing of the _Solar Queen_?"
"Sure."
"Then this is where my tablecloth artistry falls flat. The focusing of
an electron beam depends upon the electrode spacing and the voltage.
Since our voltage is fixed if we take it from the driver electrodes,
we'll have to do some mighty fine figuring. I'll need that scale
drawing."
* * * * *
Channing's tablecloth engineering was not completely wasted. By the
time the scale drawing was placed before him, Channing had half of the
table filled with equations. He studied the drawing, and selected the
levels which were to serve as electrodes. He handed the drawing to
Hadley, and the power engineer began to issue instructions to his gang.
Then the central well began to swarm with spacesuited men who bore
cutting torches. Hot sparks danced from the cut girders that held the
floorings, and at the same time, a crew of men were running cables from
the various levels to the instrument room. More hours passed while the
circular sections were insulated with the plastic rods.
The big dome above was cut in sections and removed, and then the sky
could be seen all the way from the bottom of the ship where the pilot's
greenhouse should have been.
Channing looked it over and then remarked: "All we need now is an
electron collector."
"I thought you wanted to shoot 'em off," objected Hadley.
"I do. But we've got to have a source of supply. You can't toss
baseballs off of the Transplanet Building in Northern Landing all
afternoon, you know, without having a few brought to you now and then.
Where do you think they come from?"
"Hadn't thought of it in that way. What'd happen?"
"We'd get along for the first umpty-gillion electrons, and then all
the soup we could pack on would be equalized by the positive charge on
the ship and we couldn't shoot out any more until we got bombarded by
the sun--and that bombardment is nothing to write home about as goes
quantity. What we need is a selective solar intake plate of goodly
proportions."
"We could use a mental telepathy expert, too. Or one of those new beams
that Baler and Carroll dug up out of the Martian desert. I've heard
that those things will actually suck power out of any source, and bend
beams so as to enter the intake vent, or end."
"We haven't one of those, either. Fact of the matter is," grinned
Channing ruefully, "we haven't much of anything but our wits."
"Unarmed, practically," laughed Hadley.
"Half armed, at least. Ah, for something to soak up electrons. I'm now
wondering if this electron gun is such a good idea."
"Might squirt some protons out the other direction," offered Hadley.
"That would leave us without either," said Don. "We'd be like the man
who tossed baseballs off of one side and himself off the other--Hey!
Of course we have some to spare. We can cram electrons out of the
business end, thus stripping the planetary rings from the atoms in our
cathode. From the far side we'll shoot the canal rays, which in effect
will be squirting protons, or the nuclei. Since the planetaries have
left for the front, it shouldn't be hard to take the protons away,
leaving nothing. At our present voltages, we might be able to do it."
Channing began to figure again, and he came up with another set of
anodes to be placed beyond the cathode. "We'll ventilate the cathode
and hang these negative electrodes on the far side. They will attract
the protons, impelled also by the positive charge on the front end.
We'll maintain a balance that way, effectively throwing away the whole
atomic structure of the cathode. The latter will fade, just as the
cathodes do in the driving tubes, only we'll be using electronic power
instead of sub-electronic. Y'know, Hadley, some day someone is going to
find a way to detect the--we'll call it radiation for want of anything
better--of the driver. And then there will open an entirely new field
of energy. I don't think that anybody has done more about the so-called
sub-electronic field than to make a nice, efficient driving device out
of it.
"Well, let's get our canal-ray electrodes in place. We've got about two
hours before they realize that we aren't going to come in at Mojave.
Then another two hours worth of wild messages between the Relay Station
and Mojave. Then we can expect someone to be on the lookout. I hope to
be there when they begin to look for us. At our present velocity, we'll
be flirting with the Asteroid Belt in less than nothing flat. That
isn't too bad--normally--but we're running without any meteor detector
and autopilot coupler. We couldn't duck anything from a robin's egg on
up."
"We'll get your anodes set," said Hadley.
* * * * *
Walt Franks grinned at Arden Channing. "That'll burn him," he assured
her.
"It's been on the way for about twenty minutes," laughed Arden. "I
timed it to arrive at Terra at the same time the _Solar Queen_ does.
They'll send out a special messenger with it, just as Don is getting
aboard his little scooter. It'll be the last word, for we're not
following him from Terra to here."
"You know what you've started?" asked Franks.
"Nothing more than a little feud between husband and self."
"That's just the start. Before he gets done, Don will have every ship
capable of answering back. I've found that you can catch him off
base just once. He's a genius--one of those men who never make the
same mistake twice. He'll never again be in a position to be on the
listening end only."
"Don's answer should be on the way back by now," said Arden. "Could be
you're right. Something should be done."
"Sure I'm right. Look at all the time that's wasted in waiting for
a landing to answer 'grams. In this day and age, time is money,
squared. The latter is to differentiate between this time and the first
glimmering of speedy living."
"Was there a first glimmering?" asked Arden sagely. "I've often thought
that the speed-up was a stable acceleration from the dawn of time to
the present."
"All right, go technical on me," laughed Walt. "Things do move. That
is, all except that message from your loving husband."
"You don't suppose he's squelched?"
"I doubt it. Squelching Donald Channing is a job for a superbeing. And
I'm not too sure that a superbeing could squelch Don and make him stay
squelched. Better check on Mojave."
"Gosh, if Don missed the _Solar Queen_ and I've been shooting him all
kinds of screwy 'types every hour on the hour; Walt, that'll keep him
quiet for a long, long time."
"He'd have let you know."
"That wouldn't have been so bad. But if the big bum missed and was
ashamed of it--that'll be the pay-off. Whoa, there goes the 'type!"
Arden drew the tape from the machine: