"Yeah," grinned Channing, "here's to electrons. Y'know, Walt, I was a little afraid that space might become a sort of Wild West show, with the ships bristling with space guns and betatrons and stuff like that. In which case you'd have been a stinking benefactor. But if the recoil is as bad as the output--and Newton said that it must be--I can't see ships cluttering up their insides with stuff that'll screw up their instruments and driver tubes. But the thing that amuses me about the whole thing is the total failure you produced." "Failure?" asked Walt. "What failed?" "Don't you know? Have you forgotten? Do you realize that spaceships are still ducking around meteors instead of blasting them out of the way with the Franks Electron Gun? Or did you lose sight of the fact that this dingbat started out in life as a meteor-sweeper?" Walt glared over the rim of his glass, but he had nothing to say. _Interlude:_ _Once the threat of piracy was over, Don Channing had an opportunity to think once more of the much-talked-about tube that had been found on the Martian Desert by Carroll and Baler. Predicated as a general rule, any medium used for the transmission of energy can be used as a means to transmit messages--intelligence, to use the more technical term. The reverse is not true, practically._ _And since Don Channing's initial problem during these days was to devise means of two-way communication from ship to planet--if not ship to ship--he immediately returned to Mars to seek out Messrs. Baler and Carroll._ _Strangely enough, the problem of communicating from planet to ship was not solved--nor would it be complete until some means of returning messages was devised. For the cams that kept the ship beams pointed to the place where the invisible spaceship was supposed to be had no way of knowing when the ship might swerve to miss a meteor. Many were the messages that went into space--undelivered--because a ship dodged a meteor that might have been dangerous. Postulating the rather low possibility of danger made little difference. Misdirected messages were of less importance than even the remote danger of death in the skies._ _But Don Channing's luck was running low. On arriving at Lincoln Head, he discovered that Baler and Carroll had packed up their tube and left for Terra. Keg Johnson knew about it; he informed Channing that the foremost manufacturer of electrical apparatus had offered a lucrative bid for the thing as it stood and that Big Jim Baler had grinned, saying that the money that the Terran Electric Company was tossing around would permit the two of them, Carroll and himself, to spend the rest of their lives digging around the artifacts of Mars in style._ _So Channing sent word to Venus Equilateral and told them to get in touch with either the Baler-Carroll combine or Terran Electric and make dicker._ _Then he started to make the journey back to Venus Equilateral on the regular spacelanes...._