"You have them running all the time, then?" "Certainly. At several minutes of time-lag in transmission, to try and establish a beam failure of a few seconds' duration is utter foolishness." "And you disperse the beam to a thousand miles wide to keep the beam centered at any variation?" Burbank shot at Channing. "Not for any variation. Make that any _normal_ gyration and I'll buy it." "Then why don't we disperse the beam to two or three thousand miles and do away with diversity transmission?" asked Burbank triumphantly. "Ever heard of fading?" asked Channing with a grin. "Your signal comes and goes. Not gyration, it just gets weaker. It fails for want of something to eat, I guess, and takes off after a wandering cosmic ray. At any rate, there are many times per minute that one beam will be right on the nose and yet so weak that our strippers cannot clean it enough to make it usable. Then the diversity system comes in handy. Our coupling detectors automatically select the proper signal channel. It takes the one that is the strongest and subdues the rest within itself." "Complicated?" "It was done in the heyday of radio--1935 or so. Your two channels come in to a common detector. Automatic volume control voltage comes from the single detector and is applied to all channels. This voltage is proper for the strongest channel, but is too high for the ones receiving the weaker signal; blocking them by rendering them insensitive. When the strong channel fades and the weak channel rises, the detector follows down until the two signal channels are equal and then it rises with the stronger channel." "I see," said Burbank, "Has anything been done about fading?" "It is like the weather, according to Mark Twain," smiled Channing. "'Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it.' About all we've learned is that we can cuss it out and it doesn't cuss back." "I think it should be tried," said Burbank. "If you'll pardon me, it has been tried. The first installation at Venus Equilateral was made that way. It didn't work, though we used more power than all of our diversity transmitters together. Sorry." "Have you anything to report?" Burbank asked Channing. "Nothing. I've been more than busy investigating the trouble we've had in keeping the beams centered." Burbank said nothing. He was stopped. He hoped that the secret of his failure was not generally known, but he knew at the same time that when three hundred men are aware of something interesting, some of them will see to it that all the others involved will surely know. He looked at the faces of the men around the table and saw suppressed mirth in every one of them. Burbank writhed in inward anger. He was a good poker player. He didn't show it at all.