"And how will they receive that kind of signal on the meteor spotter?" asked Arden. "The Officer of the Day will be treated to the first meteor on record that has intermittent duration--it is there only when it spells in International Code!" * * * * * Prying the toy transmitting key from young James Burke was a job only surpassed in difficulty by the task of opening the vault of the Interplanetary Bank after working hours. But Burke, Junior, was plied with soda pop, ice cream and candy. He was threatened, cajoled, and finally bribed. And what Interplanetary Communications paid for the toy finally would have made the manufacturer go out and look for another job. But Walt Franks carried the key to the scene of operations and set it on the bench to look at it critically. "A puny gadget, at that," he said, clicking the key. "Might key a couple of hundred watts with it--but not too long. She'd go up like a skyrocket under our load!" Walt opened a cabinet and began to pull out parts. He piled several parts on a bread board, and in an hour had a very husky thyraton hooked into a circuit that was simplicity itself. He hooked the thyraton into the main power circuit and tapped the key gingerly. The transmitter followed the keyed thyraton and Don took a deep breath. "Do you know code?" he asked. "Used to. Forgot it when I came to Venus Equilateral. Used to hold a ham ticket on Terra. But there's no use in hamming on the station here where you can work somebody by yelling at the top of your voice. The thing to ask is, 'Does anybody know code on board the _Empress of Kolain_?'" They forgot their keying circuit and began to adjust the transmitter to the frequency used by the meteor spotter. It was a job. But it was done, all the way from the master oscillator stage through the several frequency doubler stages and to the big power-driver stage. The output stage came next, and then a full three hours of tinkering with files and hacksaws were required to adjust the length of the main radiator and the director-elements so that their length became right for the changed frequency. Finally Walt took the key and said: "Here goes!" He began to rattle the key. In the power room, the generators screamed and the lights throughout the station flickered just a bit at the sudden surges. Don Channing said to Arden: "If someone on the _Empress of Kolain_ can understand code--" * * * * * The _Empress of Kolain_ was zipping along in its silent passage through the void. It was an unseen, undetected, unaware bit of human manufacture marking man's will among the stars. In all the known universe it moved against the forces of celestial mechanics because some intelligent mote that infested the surface of a planet once had a longing to visit the stars. In all the Solar System, most of the cosmic stuff was larger than it--but it alone defied the natural laws of space.