Kingman looked at his watch and smiled. He reached forth and cut the dinning sound of the cacophony with a vicious twist of the gain knob. Silence reigned in the spaceship; grand, peaceful silence. Kingman, his nerves frayed by the mental activity and the brain-addling music-from-nowhere, took a hot shower and went to bed.
He locked the panel of the control room first, however. He wanted no engineer tinkering with his pet relay.
Cartright came into Channing's living room with a long face. "It's bad," he said. "Bad."
"What's bad?"
"Oh I, like the rest of the fools, got caught in his trap."
"Whose trap?"
"The wild man who is trying to rock Interplanetary Communications on its axis."
"Well, how?"
"They started to buy like mad, and I held out. Then the thing dropped a few points, and I tried to take a bit of profit, so that we could go on bolstering the market. They grabbed off my stock, and then, just like that! the market was on the way up again and I couldn't find more than a few odd shares to buy back."