An insulator arced where it led the high-voltage lines that fed the anodes through the wall. Immediately it flashed over, and the room filled to the brim with the pungent odor of burning insulation. A medium-voltage anode shorted to one of the high-voltage anodes, and the stress increased in the tube. It broke from its moorings, this low-voltage anode, and it plunged backward, down the tube toward the cathode. It hit, and it was enough to jar the whole tube backward on its gimbals. The shock warped the mounting of the tube, and it flexed slightly, but sufficiently to bring the farthermost and highest voltage anode into the electron stream. It glowed redly, and the secondary emission raved back through the series of electrodes, heating them and creating more warpage. Then the pyrotechnic stopped. Great circuit breakers crashed open up in the power room hundreds of feet above them, high in the Station. Walt Franks looked out through the window at the tangled mess that had been a finely machined piece of equipment. He saw the men looking quizzically at him as he turned away from the window, and with a smile that cost him an effort, he said: "All right, so Marconi didn't get WLW on his first try, either. Come on, fellows, and we'll clean up this mess." With the utter disregard that inanimate objects show toward the inner feelings of the human being, the meteor alarm blinked again and the bell rang. The pilot tube swiveled quickly to one side, lining up with the spot in the celestial globe of the meteor detector. Out in the turret that housed the big tube, motors strived against welded commutators and the big tube tried to follow. Walt looked at the pointing tube and said: "All right! Go ahead and point!" * * * * * Don Channing smiled at Arden. "Mrs. Channing," he said, "must you persist in keeping me from my first love?" Arden smiled winningly. "Naturally. That's what I'm here for. I intend to replace your first love entirely and completely." "Yeah," drawled Don, "and what would we live on?" "I'll permit you to attend to your so-called first love during eight hours every day, providing that you remember to think of me every half-hour." "That's fine. But you really aren't fair about it. We were on Terra for two weeks. I was just getting interested in a program outlined by one of the boys that works for Interplanet, and what happened? You hauled me off to Mars. We stayed for a week at the Terraland Hotel at Canalopsis and the first time that Keg Johnson came to see us with an idea and a sheaf of papers, you rushed me off to Lincoln Head. Now I'm scared to death that some guy will try to open a blueprint here; at which I'll be rushed off to the Palanortis Country until someone finds us there. Then it'll be the Solar Observatory on Mercury or the Big Glass on Luna."