"Fast--but what is it?" "The solar beam! It propagates at C²!" "Oh, now look. Nothing can travel that fast!" "Maybe this isn't _something_!" "It has energy, energy has mass, mass cannot travel faster than the limiting speed of light." "O.K. It can't do it. But unless my measurements are all haywire, the beam gets to Sol and back at C². I can prove it." "Yeah? How? You couldn't possibly measure an interval so small as two times sixty-seven million miles--the radius of Venus' orbit--traversed at the speed of light, squared." "No. I admit that. But, Don, I got power out of Sirius!" "You WHAT?" yelled Channing. "Got power out of Sirius. And unless I've forgotten how to use a micro-clock, it figured out from here to Sirius and back with the bacon in just about ninety-three percent of the speed of light squared. Seven percent is well within the experimental error, I think, since we think of Sirius as being eight and one-half light years away. That's probably not too accurate as a matter of fact, but it's the figure I used. But here we are. Power from Sirius at C². Thirty-five billion miles per second! This stuff doesn't care how many laws it breaks!" "Hm-m-m. C², hey? Oh, lovely. Look, Walt, let's run up and take a whirl at Wes Farrell's detector. I'm beginning to envision person-to-person, ship-to-ship service, and possibly the first Interplanet Network. Imagine hearing a play-by-play account of the Solar Series!" "Wool gathering," snorted Walt. "We've gotta catch our detector first!" "Wes has something. First glimmer we've had. I think this is the time to rush into it with all eight feet and start pushing!" "O.K. Who do we want?" "Same gang as usual. Chuck and Freddie Thomas, Warren, Wes Farrell, of course, and you can get Jim Baler into it, too. No, Walt, Christine Baler is not the kind of people you haul into a screwdriver meeting." "I was merely thinking." "I know. But you're needed, and if she were around, you'd be a total loss as far as cerebration." "I like her." "So does Barney Carroll." "Um! But he isn't here. O.K., no Christine in our conference. I'll have Jeanne call the screwballs on the communicator." They dribbled into Farrell's laboratory one by one, and then Don said: "We have a detector. It is about as efficient as a slab of marble; only more so. We can get a tinkle of about ten micromicroamps at twenty feet distance from a driver tube using eight KVA input, which if we rate this in the usual spaceship efficiency, comes to about one-half G. That's about standard, for driver tubes, since they run four to a ship at two G total. "Now, that is peanuts. We should be able to wind a megammeter around the peg at twenty feet. Why, the red ionization comes out of the tube and hits our so-called detector, and the amount of ozone it creates is terrific. Yet we can't get a good reading out of it." Walt asked: "Wes, what worked, finally?"