ARDEN

"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, 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

with 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 power 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 the 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 would fill the tube with sudden death if

the pilot sent the driving power 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 two G as before. Deviation from norm:

two-tenths G."

Hadley grinned at the crew. "You'd think 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 did 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 conceivably short time between the failure and the device that

corrected failure, the _Ariadne_ hit a meteor head-on.

It is of such coincidence 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 _Ariadne_ 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 _Ariadne_ 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 pilot room 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 gravities. 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 _Ariadne_ continued to plunge on and on at 10 gravities: the

maximum speed possible out of her driving system.

The only man who remained aware of himself aboard the _Ariadne_ was the

man who was filled with gravanol and adhesive tape. No other person

expected to be hammered down by high acceleration. Only Channing,

intending to leave Terra in his own little scooter, was prepared to

withstand high G. He, with his characteristic haste of doing anything

slowly, was ready to make the Terra to Venus Equilateral passage at

five or six gravities.

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 _Ariadne_ 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 one 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 _Ariadne_ drove on

and on through space for ten hours at ten 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 drivers

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 summed up to thirty-six hundred

miles per second. She should have had about seventy-five million miles

to go at minus two G to reach Terra in thirty hours from the halfway

point, where she turned ends to go into deceleration. Instead, the

_Ariadne_ after ten hours of misdirected ten-G acceleration was thirty

million miles on her way, or about halfway to Terra. Three hours later,

driving free, the _Ariadne_ was passing Terra, having missed the planet

by several million miles.

Back in space, at a no longer existent junction between the beams from

Venus Equilateral and the _Ariadne_, Arden Channing's latest message

was indicating all sorts of minor punishment for her husband when she

got him home.

By the time that the _Ariadne_ 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? 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 what 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 dove 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' head.

"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; all doped up with gravanol and adhesive.

Thank yourself a god for that one, 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 on 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?" asked 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," objected 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 _Ariadne_.

Jimmy nodded, and the action shook him from his position. He floated.

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 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 cookie

that the rest of the crowd are all nursing busted ribs, and worse.

Lucky that full ten G died slowly as the cathodes went out; otherwise

we'd all have been tossed against the ceiling 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 to be used only 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 desk 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," said Channing. "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 circuit 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 circuit 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 into contact with 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 a 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 gyrocompass," 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

gyrocompass 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 a hundred pounds of Number 18 wire?"

"No."

"Then we can't."

"Couldn't you use a driver? Isn't that some kind of a 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 Van Der Graf generator."

"That would do it," said Channing thoughtfully. "But I don't think I'd

know how to modulate a Van Der Graf. 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. 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 with 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 in 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 focussing anodes. We'll tap in to the driver-tube supply

and take off voltage 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 re-make a driver out of it

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

Company 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 _Ariadne_?"

"Sure."

"Then this is where my tablecloth artistry falls flat. The focussing of

an electron beam depends upon the electrode spacing and the voltage.

Since our voltage is fixed if we take it from the drivers' 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 drawings to

Hadley, and the power engineer began to issue instructions to his gang.

Then the central well began to swarm with space-suited 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 instrumented 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

regards quantity. We're presenting too small a target. 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 beam

tubes 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 wouldn'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 be opened 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 of wild messages between Venus Equilateral 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 _Ariadne_ 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 the 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 _Ariadne_ 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 payoff. Whoa, there goes the 'type!"

Arden drew the tape from the machine: