Inside of the _Hippocrates_, men were frozen to their handholds. It
was messy, and cleaning up the _Hippocrates_ was a job not relished by
those who did it.
But cleaning up Venus Equilateral was no small matter, either.
A week went by before the snarled-up instruments were repaired. A week
in which the captured _Hippocrates_ was repaired, too, and used to
transport prisoners to and material and special supplies from Terra,
and Venus, and Mars. A week in which the service from planet to planet
was erratic.
Then service was restored, and life settled down to a reasonable level.
It was after this that Walt and Channing found time to spend an idle
hour together. Walt raised his glass and said: "Here's to electrons!"
"Yeah," grinned Channing, "here's to electrons. Y'know, Walt, I was a
little afraid that space might become a sort of Wild West show, with
the ships bristling with space guns and betatrons and stuff like that.
In which case you'd have been a stinking benefactor. But if the recoil
is as bad as the output--and Newton said that it must be--I can't see
ships cluttering up their insides with stuff that'll screw up their
instruments and driver tubes. But the thing that amuses me about the
whole thing is the total failure you produced."
"Failure?" asked Walt. "What failed?"
"Don't you know? Have you forgotten? Do you realize that spaceships are
still ducking around meteors instead of blasting them out of the way
with the Franks Electron Gun? Or did you lose sight of the fact that
this dingbat started out in life as a meteor-sweeper?"
Walt glared over the rim of his glass, but he had nothing to say.
_Interlude:_
_Once the threat of piracy was over, Don Channing had an opportunity to
think once more of the much-talked-about tube that had been found on
the Martian Desert by Carroll and Baler. Predicated as a general rule,
any medium used for the transmission of energy can be used as a means
to transmit messages--intelligence, to use the more technical term. The
reverse is not true, practically._
_And since Don Channing's initial problem during these days was to
devise means of two-way communication from ship to planet--if not ship
to ship--he immediately returned to Mars to seek out Messrs. Baler and
Carroll._
_Strangely enough, the problem of communicating from planet to ship
was not solved--nor would it be complete until some means of returning
messages was devised. For the cams that kept the ship beams pointed
to the place where the invisible spaceship was supposed to be had no
way of knowing when the ship might swerve to miss a meteor. Many were
the messages that went into space--undelivered--because a ship dodged
a meteor that might have been dangerous. Postulating the rather low
possibility of danger made little difference. Misdirected messages were
of less importance than even the remote danger of death in the skies._
_But Don Channing's luck was running low. On arriving at Lincoln Head,
he discovered that Baler and Carroll had packed up their tube and left
for Terra. Keg Johnson knew about it; he informed Channing that the
foremost manufacturer of electrical apparatus had offered a lucrative
bid for the thing as it stood and that Big Jim Baler had grinned,
saying that the money that the Terran Electric Company was tossing
around would permit the two of them, Carroll and himself, to spend the
rest of their lives digging around the artifacts of Mars in style._
_So Channing sent word to Venus Equilateral and told them to get in
touch with either the Baler-Carroll combine or Terran Electric and make
dicker._
_Then he started to make the journey back to Venus Equilateral on the
regular spacelanes...._