"Do you know code?" he asked.
"Used to. Forgot it when I came to Venus Equilateral. Used to hold a ham ticket on Terra. But there's no use in hamming on the station here where you can work somebody by yelling at the top of your voice. The thing to ask is, 'Does anybody know code on board the Empress of Kolain?'"
They forgot their keying circuit and began to adjust the transmitter to the frequency used by the meteor spotter. It was a job. But it was done, all the way from the master oscillator stage through the several frequency doubler stages and to the big power-driver stage. The output stage came next, and then a full three hours of tinkering with files and hacksaws were required to adjust the length of the main radiator and the director-elements so that their length became right for the changed frequency.
Finally Walt took the key and said: "Here goes!"
He began to rattle the key. In the power room, the generators screamed and the lights throughout the station flickered just a bit at the sudden surges.
Don Channing said to Arden: "If someone on the Empress of Kolain can understand code—"
The Empress of Kolain was zipping along in its silent passage through the void. It was an unseen, undetected, unaware bit of human manufacture marking man's will among the stars. In all the known universe it moved against the forces of celestial mechanics because some intelligent mote that infested the surface of a planet once had a longing to visit the stars. In all the Solar System, most of the cosmic stuff was larger than it—but it alone defied the natural laws of space.
Because it alone possessed the required outside force spoken of in Newton's "Universal Laws."
And it was doing fine.