"No!" objected Arden. "Poison him--I can't stand the sight of blood. Or better, bamboo splinters under the fingernails. He knows something simple, the big bum!" "Beer and sandwiches?" asked Walt. "Beer and sandwiches," agreed Don. "Now, Tom Swift, what gives?" "I want to key the beam. Y'see, Don, we're using the same frequency, by a half dozen megacycles, as their meteor spotter. I'm going to retune the beam to their frequency and key it. Realize what'll happen?" "Sure," agreed Don, "but you're still missing the boat. You can't transmit keyed intelligence with an intermittent contact." "In words, what do you mean, Don?" asked Arden. "International Code is a series of dots and dashes, you may know. Our wabbling beam is whipping through the area in which the _Empress of Kolain_ is passing. Therefore the contact is intermittent. And how could you tell a dot from a dash?" "Easy," bragged Walt Franks. "We're not limited to the speed of deviation, are we?" "Yes--limited by the speed of the selsyn motors that transfer the phase-shifting circuits to the director radiators. Yeah, I get it, Edison, and we can wind them up to a happy six or eight thousand r. p. m. Six would get us a hundred cycles per second--a nice, low growl." "And how will they receive that kind of signal on the meteor spotter?" asked Arden. "The officer of the day will be treated to the first meteor on record that has intermittent duration--it is there only when it spells in International Code!" Prying the toy transmitting key from young James Burke was a job only surpassed in difficulty by the task of opening the vault of the Interplanetary Bank after working hours. But Burke, Junior, was plied with soda pop, ice cream, and candy. He was threatened, cajoled, and finally bribed. And what Venus Equilateral paid for the toy finally would have made the toy manufacturer go out and look for another job. But Walt Franks carried the key to the scene of operations and set it on the bench to look at it critically. "A puny gadget, at that," he said, clicking the key. "Might key a couple of hundred watts with it--but not too long. She'd go up like a skyrocket under our load!" Walt opened up a cabinet and began to pull out parts. He piled several parts on a bread board, and in an hour had a very husky thyraton hooked into a circuit that was simplicity itself. He hooked the thyraton into the main power circuit and tapped the key gingerly. The transmitter followed the keyed thyraton and Don took a deep breath. "Do you know code?" he asked. "Used to. Forgot it when I came to Venus Equilateral. Used to hold a ham ticket on Terra. But there's no use hamming on the station here where you can wake somebody by yelling at the top of your voice. The thing to ask is, 'Does anyone know code on board the _Empress of Kolain_?'"