"Oh, I was saying that I was tinkering around the skyways with the _Anopheles_--that's the ship we hooked up with the solar beam for power, you know--and I got to wondering about that discrepancy. The faster you go, the greater is the angular displacement, and then with some measurements, I came up with a bugger factor--" "Woah, goodness," laughed Christine. "What is a bugger factor?" "You'll learn," said Arden, "that the boys out here have a language all their own. I've heard them use that one before. The bugger factor is a sort of multiplying, or dividing, or additive, or subtractive quantity. You perform the mathematical operation with the bugger factor, and your original wrong answer turns into the right answer." "Is it accepted?" "Oh sure," answered Arden. "People don't realize it, but that string of 4's in the derivation of Bode's Law is a bugger factor." "You," said Christine to Walt, "will also tell me what Bode's Law is--but later." "O.K.," grinned Walt. "At any rate, I came up with a bugger factor that gave me to think. The darned solar beam points to where Sol actually is!" "_Whoosh!_" exclaimed Channing. "You don't suppose we're tinkering with the medium that propagates the law of gravity?" "I don't know. I wouldn't know. Has anyone ever tried to measure the velocity of propagation of the attraction of gravity?" "No, and no one will until we find some way of modulating it." Jim Baler smiled. "No wonder Barney was a little wacky when he got home. I come out here to take a look around and maybe give a lift to your gang on the transmission tube--and bump right into a discussion on the possibility of modulating the law of gravity!" "Not the law, Jim, just the force." "Now he gets technical about it. You started out a couple of months ago to detect driver radiation, and ended up by inventing a beam that draws power out of the sun. Think you'll ever find the driver radiation?" "Probably." "Yeah," drawled Arden. "And I'll bet a hat that when they do, they won't have any use for it. I've seen 'em work before." "Incidentally," asked Christine, "you mentioned the _Anopheles_, and I think that is the first ship I've ever heard of that hasn't a feminine name. How come?" "The mosquito that does the damage is the female," grinned Jim. "The Mojave spaceyards owns a sort of tender craft. It has a couple of big cranes on the top and a whole assortment of girders near the bottom. It looks like, and is also called: _The Praying Mantis_. Those are also female; at least the ones that aren't afraid of their shadow are." Channing said suddenly: "Walt, have you tried the propagation-time of the solar beam on the _Anopheles_?" "No. How would we go about doing that?" "By leaving the controls set for 1-G, and then starting the ship by swapping the tube energizing voltages from test power to operating power." "Should that tell us?"