"Yeah, but not impossible. It's quite believable that the right alloys should be found _au naturel_, so to speak. There's nothing tricky about cupralum. Mix it together and smelt it down--_voila_!--cupralum. A totally useless and good-for-nothing alloy prior to the discovery of the gravitic spectrum." "Must be fairly large," suggested Timkins. "Sure--according to man-made standards. Celestially, it might be a mere scrap of dirt. A sub-sub-sub-microscopic bit of cosmic dust less than a hundred miles in diameter." "Ugh," grunted Larry. "You make man and his works sort of insignificant." "We are. Do the planets care what we do on their miles-thick hides? Do the suns care that we wonder at them? Does the cosmos give a rap that we chase from planet to planet and from sun to sun?" "You make it sound as though they are capable of thinking." "If they did, we wouldn't know about it; and they wouldn't know we existed. Proportionally, man is smaller than the filterable virus. So we have a slab of cupralum, which is--according to Mac--Here! That's fine. It blankets Telfu like a complete shroud, as far as the good old gravitics go." Larry Timkins looked up from a page of scrawled equations. "A slab of cupralum a hundred miles in diameter, rotating in the mechanogravitic field thrown out by Sirius would certainly soak up every bit of power. Must be a slick tie-in. The gravitron puts our O.K. on a resistive load. Hooked to the drive, everything goes _phhht_." "Sure. That's part of the trouble. It's the drive, coupled with the general gravitic interference cut up by Soaky." "Soaky?" "I have hung a name on the satellite. Heretofore it has been nameless. We have named it _Soaky_." * * * * * "There is a slight discrepancy between this cardioid and the calculated curve," said McBride. "Obviously, the cusp would be on a line between Telfu and Soaky, projected from the satellite through the planet to the far side. We orbited around the planet and were closer to Soaky on the side he was on--" "Is that syllogistic reasoning?" asked Hammond. "Or sheer conjecture? How about shadow?" "This is quite a wide effect." "Any shading of Soaky's sphere of influence would tend to deepen the cusp like that. That cardioid is such a curve; there's no reason to doubt that Telfu would tend to shade the field." "Larry. Can you calculate the field absorption of a standard model planet with the above figures?" "The attenuation?" "Yes." "Sure. It'd help if I knew the chemical components, mass, physical constants, electrical properties, gravitic properties, and nuclear emanations. How close do you want it?" "Plus or minus twenty percent."