"I'm not so sure that you understand this yourself," he replied. "But I know this—I don't want to lose you, Elaine. If you haven't worked this out within a month or so after you leave Titan, I'll come looking for you."
She turned and, without a word, went over and kissed him. Then she quickly left the office.
Lee returned to his desk. He sat down and stared at Childe's graph again. After a few minutes, he angrily slapped it in a drawer, slammed the thing shut, and stamped out of the room.
Personal matters were soon buried in the excitement of another discovery, this time an important one. It looked promising.
Kurtzman and Kulaki finally discovered what form of energy the antennas were beaming out.
After years of trial-and-error experimentation, the engineer and electronicist asked Richards and Childe to lend a hand. With a firm theoretical and mathematical background to bolster their work, Kurtzman and Kulaki started out on a process of elimination.
They soon proved that the antennas were not broadcasting any known form of electromagnetic energy, from gamma to long-radio waves. They investigated one possibility after another, turning up a steady succession of negative answers. Negative, but answers all the same. It was time-consuming, but at least they were definitely determining which avenues were blind alleys.
Then Childe started tinkering with a hunch, and showed his paperwork to Richards. The two of them made a few suggestions to Kurtzman and Kulaki. Their problem was that their detection instruments were drawing blanks, when applied to the antennas' output. But the power input to the antennas showed they were working continuously.
Childe showed, mathematically, that their output must be an extremely weak, low-frequency form of energy. Richards agreed, and pointed out that there was only one known form of energy that fulfilled these conditions: gravity.