Walt put his equipment down and rummaged through it. He selected a supersensitive thermocouple and bridge and fixed the couple to one of the fixtures in the room. He balanced the bridge after the swinging needle came to a halt--when the thermocouple junction had assumed the temperature of the fixture. "Now," he said, "we'll read that at the end of a half hour and we'll then calculate the caloric out-go and balance it against the kilowatts heading out through the energy beam." "And in the meantime?" asked Christine. "In the meantime, we measure the electrical constants to within an inch of their lives," he told her. "I've got a couple of real fancy meters here--this one that I'm hooking across the original wattmeter in the circuit measures the wattages in the region between one hundred thousand kilowatts and one hundred ten thousand kilowatts. Designed especially as a high-level meter." Walt clipped the portable meters in place and made recordings. Finally he nodded. "Right on the button," he said. "Just what the meters should read." The crystal began to vibrate faintly, and Walt mentioned that either Wes Farrell was calling Freddie Thomas or vice versa. "Can't hear it very well," complained Walt, "because Wes has the amplifiers downstairs, both incoming amplifier from the dynamic pick-up--we had to give up the standard crystal because it is expected to get cold enough to make the crystal too brittle---to the modulating equipment. The monitor-speaker is outside--we haven't been in here enough to make use of it since our first tries." Walt took a look at the bridge on the thermocouple and nodded vaguely. He killed more time by showing Christine the huge tube that drained the latent heat out of the room and hurled it across the solar system to Pluto. "Y'know," he grinned as a thought struck him, "I think we've licked the Channing Layer that so neatly foiled Mark Kingman and Terran Electric on that solar power project." "Yes?" "Sure," he said. "All we do is set up a real beam-input device on the moon, for instance, and then use a batch of these things to draw the power from there." "But how about the formation of ozone?" "That'll have to be checked," said Walt. "For Pluto hasn't got a Channing Layer, of course, and our station out there is no criterion. But you note there is no smell of ozone in here. That leads me to think that w've given Terran Electric the runaround once more. Funny thing about Kingman, if someone gave him this development, he'd never think of reversing it to bring energy in." "From what I know of the man," said Christine, "he'd not think of reversing, but he would think of perverting." "Christine!" shouted Walt. "Huh?" asked the bewildered girl. "You may have had your thought for the week!" Walt tried a bit of Indian War Dance but failed because the pseudo-gravitic force was too light to hold him down. They were too close to the axis for full force. "But I don't understand."