"Something hurt?" asked Arden. "No. Walt, we can wave the beam." "Until we find 'em? We've been trying that. No worky." Freddy called in excitedly: "Something went by just now and I don't think it was Christmas!" "We might have hit 'em a dozen times in the last ten minutes and we'll never know it," said Channing. "But the spaceliners can be caught. Let's shoot at them like popping ducks. Shotgun effect. Look, Walt, we can electronically dance the beam at a high rate of speed, spraying the neighborhood. Freddy can hear us return because we have to hit them all the time and the waver coming on the way back will pass through his position again and again. We'll set up director elements in the reflector, distorting the electrical surface of the parabolic reflector. That'll divert the beam. By making the phases swing right, we can scan the vicinity of the _Empress of Kolain_ like a flying-spot television camera." Walt turned to one of the technicians and explained. The man nodded. He left for Franks' laboratory and Walt turned back to his friends. "Here shoots another couple of hours. I, for one, am going to grab forty winks." Jim, the beam-control man, sat down and lighted a cigarette. Freddy let his flitter coast free. And the generators that fed the powerful transmitter came whining to a stop. But there was no sleep for Don and Walt. They kept awake to supervise the work, and to help in hooking up the phase-splitting circuit that would throw out-of-phase radio frequency into the director-elements to swing the beam. Then once again the circuits were set up. Freddy found the position again and began to hold it. The concentric beam hurled out again, and as the phase-shift passed from element to element, the beam swept through an infinitesimal arc that covered thousands of miles of space by the time the beam reached the position occupied by the _Empress of Kolain_. Like a painter, the beam painted in a swipe a few hundred miles wide and swept back and forth, each sweep progressing ahead of the stripe before by less than its width. It reached the end of its arbitrary wall and swept back to the beginning again, covering space as before. Here was no slow, irregular swing of mechanical reflector, this was the electronically controlled wavering of a stable antenna. And this time the half-hour passed slowly but not uneventfully. Right on the tick of the instant, Freddy called back: "Got 'em."