"What was it like?"
"Wavered up and down like fierce for about a minute after I turned it on. Then it died quick, and has been dead ever since."
"Could it have been anything cockeyed with the instruments?"
"Nope. I've checked every part in this circuit, and everything is as good as it ever will be. No, something external caused that response."
"You've tried the solar tube with a dynode of the same alloy as the driver cathodes?"
"Uh-huh. Nothing at all. Oh, I'll take that back. I got a scratch. With a pre-meter gain of about four hundred decibels, I read three micromicroamperes. That was detected from a driver tube forty feet across the room, running at full output. I wondered for a minute whether the opposing driver was doing any cancellation, and so I took a chance and killed it for about a half second, but that wasn't it."
"Nuts. Does the stuff attenuate with distance?"
"As best as I could measure, it was something to the tune of inversely proportional to the cube root of the distance. That's normal for beams of a not-too-tight nature and it shows that the stuff isn't globularly radiated. But the amplifier gain was hanging right on the limit of possible amplification, and the meter was as sensitive as a meter can be made, I think. You couldn't talk from one end of Venus Equilateral to the other with a set like that."
"No, I guess you're right. Hey! Look!"
The meter took a sudden upswing, danced for a minute, and died once more.