"Hi, Nadia old dear!" and "Daughter, from what I can see of my son-in-law, I believe that he may do," came together from the speaker. Nadia tore herself from Stevens' embrace, to see upon the lambent screen the happily smiling faces of her mother and sister.
"Mother! Claire! Oh, you three wonder-workers!" She addressed simultaneously the distant Terrestrials and the scientists at her side, while broken exclamations, punctuated by ominous, crackling snaps, came from the laboring amplifier.
"Sorry to interrupt," MacDonald's voice broke in, "but you'll have to hurry it up. Alcantro and Fedanzo are doing their best, but every plate in my secondary bank's red hot, and you could fry an egg on any one of my transformers. Even my primary tubes are running hot. She won't hold together five minutes longer!"
Captain King opened his book, and in that small steel room, unadorned save for stack upon stack of bookcases, the brief but solemn ceremony joining two young lives was read—its solemnity only intensified by its unique accompaniment. For from Brandon at the primary controls, through the power-room of the Sirius and the relay-station upon Mars, to the immense Interplanetary transmitter upon Earth, the greatest radio and television engineers of two planets were fighting overdriven equipment, trying to hold an almost impossible connection, in order that Nadia Newton's mother and sister might be present at her wedding, hundreds of millions of miles distant in space!
"I pronounce you man and wife. Whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder." The sacred old ritual ended and Captain King picked up the bride in his great arms as though she were a baby, kissed her vigorously, and set her down in front of the transmitter. In the midst of the joyous confusion that ensued a tearing, rattling crash came from the speaker and the screen went blank.
"There!" lamented MacDonald from the power room. "I knew they'd blow! There goes my whole secondary bank—eight perfectly good ten-nineteens all shot to...."
"That's too bad, but it couldn't be helped; they went for a good cause," interrupted Brandon. "I'll come down and help clean up the mess."
Leaving the bridal party, he made his way rapidly to the power room, where he found MacDonald and the two Martians inspecting the smoking remains of what had been the secondary bank of their powerful ultra-transmitter. Spare parts in abundance were on hand, and it was not long until the damaged section was apparently as good as new.
"Now to try her out," Brandon announced. "We want to give her a good workout, but there's no use trying the I-P stations any more—they're altogether too hard to handle at this range. Czuv said something about an unknown race of monstrosities at the south pole of Jupiter—let's try it on them for a while."
He flung the field of force out into space, as responsive to his will as a well-trained horse, and guided it toward the southern limb of that gigantic world. Down and down the projection plunged, through mile after mile of reeking, steaming fog, impenetrable to earthly eyes. Finally it came to rest upon the surface, hundreds of feet deep in a lush, dank, tropical jungle, and Brandon plugged into the Venerian room.