Christine inspected Walt carefully. Then nodded. "Yup," she grinned.
"Even you sound better than the Interplanetary Network!"
For once, Walt did not argue, having gained his point.
_Interlude:_
_When the final problem of communicating with a ship in space was
solved, the laboratories on Venus Equilateral returned to their
original trends. These lines of research and study were wide and
varied. Men dabbled brilliantly with insane, complex gadgets that
measured the work-functions of metals in electron emission and they
made conclusive measurements on the electrical conductivity under
extremes of heat and cold. From the uranium pile that powered Venus
Equilateral there came metals that had been under neutron bombardment
long enough to have their crystal structure altered in unfathomable
ways. These were investigated by men who toyed with them to ascertain
whether or not they possessed any new properties that might make them
useful. Many were the fields studied, too, because it is often that a
chemist may be baffled by a problem that could be solved by a thorough
education in electronics, for instance._
_And from the diversified studies and researches there often
came strange by-products. The quick leap of the physicist from a
hare-brained theory to a foregone conclusion has been the subject of
laughter, but it is no less related than the chain of events that led
from an exposed photographic plate to Hiroshima._
_Or the chain of events that led Wes Farrell from his observation of
a technician cleaning up a current-sputtered knife switch to a minor
space war...._