So I went back down the main power line from Doctor McPherson's home--high grade, pure liquor in that line!--and tracked it upstream to the city power house. But when I took a deep bite, all the generators stopped and an auxiliary circuit from somewhere else started up. I ate a piece of main coil in disgust. Well, that was no use. And then I remembered the little e beings' comments on a food flood due in the spaceway. A sunburst, no doubt. A magnetic storm on the sun would certainly send a harvest out through space for e beings. But it would louse up the planetary radio system. And there I had an answer. All I had to do was remove the radio interference in a planned way and every receiver on half the world would receive my signals. How easy it was! So I went back up to the first layer of the doughnut round the Earth where there was a field of fresh energy. As the food came flooding in from the sun I gobbled it up. Mouthful. Pause. Mouthful, mouthful. Pause. Mouthful, mouthful, mouthful. Pause. I worked up and down the numbers in progression, swallowing every lump of solar radiation within reach. But I guess I was carried away by the enjoyable eating. A lot more time passed than I had intended; and when I came down again to read a few thoughts, the world was freezing in parts, and the sea was boiling in others, and the mush lay flat as a desert in wide patches. I worked it out, eventually. No energy means no evaporation, thus no clouds and no rain for vegetation. And that means no carbon dioxide layer to protect the planet, in turn leading to excessive radiation when I stopped eating, hence deserts and a boiling ocean and parts of the land frozen solid. Not a very good message. * * * * * Well, I cleaned up as best I could, but it was drudgery sipping up the dull, flat-tasting thermal energy of the oceans. Tidal forces and magnetic flows are stodgy, uninteresting diets. You might as well eat straight mush. I decided not to try that again. It had too many repercussions. What I wanted was a nice simple signal. A volcano would do excellently, I thought--Indian smoke signals on a vast scale. So I hunted over the mush until I came to a reasonably active fountain, probably Vesuvius but I'm not sure; one blob of mush looks like another. And I drank the whole internal fire in bursts. Anyone with any sense could have seen the Morse-coded eruptions that I let go through. But they didn't. They missed my signals altogether. Chiefly because I had disturbed the balance of stresses down at the foot of the volcano, deep in the mush, and when I came out it was dancing about in ripples and shakes. I don't suppose many people would stop in the middle of an earthquake to note the signals coming out of the local volcano. Anyway, no one did.