Don spoke to the man chosen to control the beam. "You can start any time now. Keep her knifed clean, if you can."
The man grinned at Channing. "If the devils that roam the void are with us we'll have no trouble. We should all pray for a phrase used by some characters in a magazine I read once: 'Clear ether!' We could use some right now."
He applied his eyes to the telescope. He fiddled with the verniers for a brief time, made a major adjustment on a larger handwheel, and then said, without removing his eye from the 'scope, "That's it, Dr. Channing."
Don answered: "O.K., Jim, but you can use the screen now. We aren't going to make you squint through that pipe for the next few hours straight."
"That's all right. I'll use the screen as soon as we can prove we're right. Ready?"
"Ready," said Channing.
Franks closed a tiny switch. Below, in the transmitter room, relays clicked and heavy-duty contacts closed with blue fire. Meters began to climb upward across their scales, and the generators moaned in a descending whine. A shielded monitor began to glow, indicating that full power was vomiting from the mouth of the reflector.
And out from the projector there went, like a spearhead, a wavefront of circularly polarized microwaves. Die-true they sped, crossing the void like a line of sight to an invisible spot above Mars and to the left. Out past the Sun, where they bent inward just enough to make Jim's job tough. Out across the open sky they sped at the velocity of light, and taking sixteen minutes to get there.
Would it—or wouldn't it?
A half-hour passed. "Now," said Channing. "Are we?"