"Sure," said Walt. "We fire off a batch of electrons, and the first contingent that arrives charges the affair so that the rest of the beam sort of wriggles out of line." "Your meteor is going to take on a charge of phenomenal negative value, and the rest of your beam is going to be deflected away, just as your electron lenses deflect the original beam," said Channing. "And now another thing, old turnip. You're squirting out a lot of electrons. That's much amperage. Your voltage--velocity--is nothing to rave about. Watts is what you want, to corn a phrase." "_Phew_," said Walt. "Corn, he says. Go on, prodigy, and make with the explanations. I agree, we should have more voltage and less quantity. But we're running the stuff at plenty of voltage now. Nothing short of a Van Der Graf generator would work--and while we've got one up on the forty-ninth level, we couldn't run a supply line down here without reaming a fifty-foot hole through the Station, and then I don't know how we'd get that kind of voltage down here without ... that kind of stuff staggers the imagination. You can't juggle a hundred million volts on a wire. She'd squirt off in all directions." "Another thing, whilst I hold it in my mind," said Channing thoughtfully. "You go flinging electrons off the Station in basketful after basketful, and the next bird that drops a ship on the landing stage is going to spot-weld himself right to the South end of Venus Equilateral. It wouldn't be long before the Station would find itself being pulled into Sol because of the electrostatic stress--if we didn't run out of electrons first!" "I hardly think that we'd run out--but we might have a tough time flinging them away after a bit. Could be that we should blow out a fist full of positrons at the same time?" "Might make up a concentric beam and wave the positive ions at the target," said Channing. "Might help." "But this space-charge effect. How do we get around that?" "Same way we make the electron gun work. Fire it off at a devilish voltage. Run your electron velocity up near the speed of light; the electrons at that speed will acquire considerable mass, in accordance with Lorenz's equation which shows that as the velocity of a mass reaches the speed of light, its mass becomes infinite. With a healthy mass built up by near-light velocities, the electrons will not be as easy to deflect. Then, too, we can do the damage we want before the charge can be built up that will deflect the stream. We ram 'em with a bundle of electrons moving so fast that the charging effect can not work; before the space charge can build up to the level required for self-nullification of our beam, the damage is done." "And all we need is a couple of trillion volts. Two times ten to the twelfth power. _Grrr._" "I can see that you'll need a tablecloth," said Arden. "You birds can think better over at Joe's. Come along and feed the missus, Don."