"That sounds like a nice alibi," said Arden with a smile. "Or a come-on. I don't know which. Or, Mr. Channing, am I being told that my advances might not be welcome?" "We shall see," Channing said. "We'll have to make a careful study of the matter. I cannot make any statements without first making a thorough examination under all sorts of conditions. Here we are. You will precede me through the door, please." "Why?" asked Arden. "So that you cannot back out at the last possible moment. Once I get you inside, I'll think about keeping you there!" "As long as you have some illegal fluid, I'll stay." She tried to leer at Don but failed because she had had all too little experience in leering. "Bring it on!" "Here's to the good old days," toasted Don as the drinks were raised. "Nope. Here's to the future," proposed Arden. "Those good old days--all they were was old. If you were back in them, you'd still have to have the pleasure of meeting Burbank." "_Grrrr_," growled Channing. "That name is never mentioned in this household." "You haven't a pix of the old bird turned to the wall, have you?" asked Arden. "I tossed it out." "We'll drink to that." They drained glasses. "And we'll have another." "I need another," said Channing. "Can you imagine that buzzard asking me to invent something big in seven days?" "Sure. By the same reasoning that he uses to send a letter from Venus Equilateral instead of just slipping it in on the Terra beam. Faulty." "Phony." The door opened abruptly and Walt Franks entered. "D'ja hear the latest?" he asked breathlessly. "No," said Channing. He was reaching for another glass automatically. He poured, and Walt watched the amber fluid creep up the glass, led by a sheet of white foam. "Then look!" Walt handed Channing an official envelope. It was a regular notice to the effect that there had been eleven failures of service through Venus Equilateral. "Eleven! What makes?" "Mastermind." "What's he done?" "Remember the removal of my jurisdiction over the beam control operators? Well, in the last ten days, Burbank has installed some new features to cut expenses. I think that he hopes to lay off a couple of hundred men." "What's he doing, do you know?" "He's shortening the dispersion. He intends to cut the power by slamming more of the widespread beam into the receptor. The tighter beam makes aiming more difficult, you know, because at seventy million miles, every time little Joey on Mars swings his toy horseshoe magnet on the end of his string, the beam wabbles. And at seventy million miles, how much wabbling does it take to send a narrow beam clear off the target?" "The normal dispersion of the beam from Venus is over a thousand miles wide. It gyrates and wabbles through most of that arc. That is why we picked that particular dispersion. If we could have pointed the thing like an arrow, we'd have kept the dispersion down."