"I don't know. As best as we can calculate, driver radiation propagates at the square of the speed of light, and that gives us a twenty-four minute edge on Venus Equilateral at the present time. For all I know, that music may be coming from the other end of the galaxy. At the square of the speed of light, you could talk to Centauri and get an answer in not too long." "But if we had a chance to tinker with that relay, we might be able to find out what tunes it and then we can tune in the Lunar station and tune out that cat-melody." "I'm running this show--and this relay is going to stay right where it is. I don't care a hoot about the control circuit it breaks; those contacts are set, somehow, so that we can detect driver radiation, and I'm not taking any chances of having it ruined." "Can't you turn the gain down, at least?" "Nope. We'd miss the gang at Luna." The speaker spoke in that faint, flat-toned human voice again. It was easy to see that all that gain was necessary to back up the obviously faint response of Kingman's detector. The speaker said: "Kingman! Addison got power through the Channing Layer!" That was all for about an hour. Meanwhile, the mewling tones burst forth again and again, assaulting the ears with intent to do damage. The messages were terse and for the most part, interesting. They gave the market reports; they intercepted the beam transmissions through the Terran Heaviside Layer before they got through the Lunar Relay Station, inspected the swiftly-moving tape and transmitted the juicy morsels to Kingman via the big driver tube that stood poised outside of the landed spaceship. Kingman enjoyed an hour of celebration at Addison's success, and then the joy turned to bitter hate as the message came through telling of the ozone that resulted in the passage of the solar beam through the atmosphere. The success of the beam, and the utter impossibility of using it were far worse than the original fact of the beam's failure to pass the Channing Layer. So Kingman went back to his stock market machinations, and applied himself diligently. And as the days wore on, Kingman's group manipulated their watered stock and ran the price up and down at will, and after each cycle Kingman's outfit owned just one bit more of Venus Equilateral. Terran Electric would emerge from this battle with Interplanetary Communications as a subsidiary--with Kingman at the helm! * * * * * Walt Franks entered Channing's office with a wild-eyed look on his face. "Don! C^2!" "Huh? What are you driving about?" "C^2. The speed of light, squared!" "Fast--but what is it?" "The solar beam! It propagates at C^2!" "Oh, now look. Nothing can travel that fast!" "Maybe this isn't _something_!" "It has energy, energy has mass, mass cannot travel faster than the limiting speed of light." "O.K. It can't do it. But unless my measurements are all haywire, the beam gets to Sol and back at C^2. I can prove it."