Then it was blast-off morning, with me trying to keep my mind off my phobia and those nagging fears that had nothing to do with space-hopping. I cornered the Professor in the Banshee's control room.
"The power drain of this widget of yours has me worried," I complained. "The secondaries are already running overloaded."
As pilot-engineer, power was my responsibility.
Professor Tim Harrigan looked around, but not in his usual quick, birdlike way, and his eyes were dull.
"I'm sorry, Olsen." His voice sounded as though something were missing. "I haven't been able to reduce input requirements yet. The circuit changes keep eluding me."
Worms started squirming inside me. If the Professor, with his brilliant brain, were getting the Complex—
"Polly will tell Mike to be careful of power," he tried to reassure me.
Naturally Polly was scheduled to handle the ground end. She usually did whenever we were testing one of the Professor's inventions. In some ways she was more like a partner than a daughter to him. The set in the Professor's laboratory was rigged for her, while the Hustic aboard ship was adjusted to Mike's brain-wave pattern.
That's right. The thing we were going to test en route to Mars was the Harrigan Unimodulate Subetheric Telepathic Interspatial Communicator. Yes, I know that officially the Hustic wasn't invented until nearly a year later. Keeping it under wraps after what it did was one of our security measures. We were afraid someone might add two and two and get us hanged, shot, stabbed, defenestrated, etc.
That first set was a bulky, power-hogging, spit-and-solder job very different from the perfected, foolproof, universal-type transceivers that have now replaced the clumsy old Luminophones on all interplanetary routes.