Channing cut the gain down to a whisper and put a message on the beam, confirming his reception. Ten minutes later, Charley changed his set speech, and said: "Good! Too bad we haven't got one of those receivers here, or we could make this a two-way with some action. Now listen, Don. My idiot brother says he can make the beam transmit without the drive. Unfortunately, I am not a driver expert like he is and so I can not remonstrate with the half-wit. So, and right now, we're cutting the supply voltage to the final focusing anode. Whoops! I just floated off the floor and the mike cable is all tangled up in my feet. This free stuff is not as simple as the old fiction writers claimed it was. Things are floating all over the place like mad. The accelerometer says exactly zero, and so you tell me if we are getting out. We're going back on 1-G so that we can sit down again. That's better! Though the idiot--it's a shame to be forced to admit that one of your family is half-witted--didn't wait until we were in position to fall. I almost landed on my head--which is where he was dropped as an infant. How was it? Did you hear my manly voice whilst we were going free? Say 'No' so that my idiot brother will not have anything to say about his brilliant mind. I'm out of breath and we're going back on that home recording of Freddy saying, and I will let him quote, via acetate." The sound of a phonograph pickup being dropped on a record preceded Freddy's voice saying: "One, two, three, four, test. One--" Channing cut the gain again. "That red-hot. I thought he was talking all this time." "Not the Thomas Boys. That comes under the classification of 'Work' which they shun unless they can not get any kind of machine to do it for them," laughed Walt. * * * * * Walt turned the dials back to the unearthly symphony. "At C^2, that might come from Sirius," he said, listening carefully. "Sounds like Chinese." "Oh, now look," objected Don. "What off earth would a Chinese Symphony be doing with a driver-modulator system?" "Broadcasting--" "Nope. The idea of detecting driver radiation is as old as the hills. If any culture had uncovered driver-beam transmission, we'd all have been aware of it. So far as I know, we, and the Terran Electric crowd are the only ones who have had any kind of an opportunity of working with this sub-etheric energy. Wes, have you another miniature of the relay tube handy?" "Sure. Why?" "I'm going to see if this stuff can be made directional. You're bringing whatever it is into the place on a collector plate and slamming it into an input-terminal power-transmission tube. It goes across the table to the relay tube, and is amplified, and then is tossed across more table to the load-terminal tube, where the output is impressed across your alloy disk. Right?" "Right."