The minutes passed slowly, and then Wes announced: "She should be here. Crack your anode-coupler, Barney." Barney advanced the dial, gingerly. The air that could have grown tense was, of course, not present in the blister. But the term is but a figure of speech, and therefore it may be proper to say that the air grew tense. Fact is, it was the nerves of the men that grew tense. Higher and higher went the dial, and still the meter stayed inert against the zero-end pin. "Not a wiggle," said Barney in disgust. He twirled the dial all the way around, and snorted. The meter left the zero pin ever so slightly. Channing turned the switch that increased the sensitivity of the meter until the needle stood halfway up the scale. "Solar power, here we come," he said in a dry voice. "One half ampere at seven volts! Three and one half watts. Bring on your atom-smashers! Bring on your power-consuming factory-districts. Hang the whole load of Central United States on the wires, for we have three and one half watts! Just enough to run an electric clock!" "But would it keep time?" asked Barney. "Is the frequency right?" "Nope--but we'd run it. Look, fellows, when anyone tells you about this, insist that we got thirty-five hundred milliwatts on our first try. It sounds bigger." "O.K., so we're getting from Sol just about three tenths of the soup we need to make the set-up self-sustaining," said Walt. "Wes, this in-phase anode of yours--what can we do with it?" "If this thing worked, I was going to suggest that there is enough power out there to spare. We could possibly modulate the in-phase anode with anything we wanted, and there would be enough junk floating around in the photosphere to slam on through." "Maybe it is that lack of selectivity that licks us now," said Don. "Run the voltage up and down a bit. There should be D.C. running around in Sol, too." "Whatever this power-level is running at," said Barney, "we may get in-phase voltage--or in-phase power by running a line from the power terminal back. Move over, boys, I'm going to hang a test clip in here." Barney's gloved hands fumbled a bit, but the clip was attached. He opened the anode-coupler once again, and the meter slammed against the full-scale peg. "See?" he said triumphantly. "Yup," said Channing cryptically. "You, Bernard, have doubled our input." "Mind if I take a whack at aligning it?" asked Wes. "Go ahead. What we need is a guy with eyes in his fingertips. Have you?" "No, but I'd like to try." Farrell worked with the deflection plate alignment, and then said, ruefully: "No dice. Barney had it right on the beam." "Is she aligned with Sol?" asked Channing. Walt squinted down the tube. "Couldn't be better," he said, blinking. "Could it be that we're actually missing Sol?" asked Don. "I mean, could it be that line-of-sight and line-of-power aren't one and the same thing?"