"What do you want us to do? Get down on the floor and chew on the rug? You know us better than that. If we can find the answer to contacting a spaceship in flight, we'll add another flower to our flag. But we can't do it by clawing through the first edition of Henney's 'Handbook of Radio Engineering.' It will be done by the seat of our pants if at all; a pair of side-cutters and a spool of wire, a hunk of string and a lump of solder, a—"
"A rag, a bone, and a hank of hair?" asked Franks.
"Leave Kipling out of this. He didn't have to cover the whole Solar System. So let's get cooking."
Don and Walt left the office just a trifle on the fast side. Arden looked after them, out through the open door, shaking her head until she remembered something that she could do. She smiled and went to her typewriter and pounded out a message back to Williams at Interplanet. It read: "Channing and Franks at work on contacting the Empress of Kolain. Will do our best." And she signed it: "Venus Equilateral."
Unknowing of the storm, the Empress of Kolain sped silently through the void, accelerating constantly at one gee. Hour after hour she was adding to her velocity, building it up to a speed that would make the trip in days, and not weeks. Her drivers flared dull red no more, for there was not atmosphere for the electronic stream to excite. Her few portholes sparkled with light, but they were nothing in comparison to the starry curtain of the background.
Her hull was of a neutral color, and though the sun glanced from her metal flanks, a reflection from a convex side is not productive of a beam of light. It spreads according to the degree of convexity and is soon lost.
What constitutes an apparent absence? The answer to that question is the example of a ship in space flight. The Empress of Kolain did not radiate anything detectable in the electromagnetic scale from ultralong waves to ultrahigh frequencies; nothing at all that could be detected at any distance beyond a few thousand miles. The sweep of her meteor-spotting equipment would pass a spot in micro-seconds at a hundred miles; at the distance from the Relay Station, the sweep of the beam would be curved like the stream of water from a swung hose and therefore useless for direction finding, even though the Station's excellent equipment could pick up the signal. And so fleeting would be the touch of the spotting beam that the best equipment ever known or made would have no time to react, thus marking the signal.
Theorists claim a thing nonexistent if it cannot be detected. The Empress of Kolain was invisible. It was undetectable to radio waves. It was in space, so no physical wave could be transmitted to be depicted as sound. Its mass was inconsiderable. Its size was comparatively sub-microscopic, and therefore it would occult few, if any, stars. Therefore, to all intents and purposes, the Empress of Kolain was nonexistent, and would remain in that state of material-non-being until it came to life again upon its landing at Venus.
Yet the Empress of Kolain existed in the minds of the men who were to find her. Like the shot unseen, fired from a distant cannon, the Empress of Kolain was coming at them with ever-mounting velocity, its unseen course a theoretical curve.