"What's cooking?" asked Jim.
"The meters are all going crazy in my end," said Barney. "I seem to be sucking power out of everything in line with my tube."
"The so-called relay station is firing away at full power and doing nothing but draining plenty of power from the line," complained Christine.
"And on my end, I was beginning to scorch the wallpaper again. I don't understand it. With no receiver-end, how can I scorch wallpaper?"
"Ask the Martians. They know."
"You ask 'em. What shall we do, invent a time machine and go back sixty centuries?"
"Wish we could," said Barney. "I'd like to ask the bird that left this textbook why they didn't clarify it more."
"Speaking of Don Channing again," said Jim, "I'll bet a hat that one of his tube-replacement manuals for the big transmitters out on Venus Equilateral do not even mention that the transmitter requires a receiver before it is any good. We think we're modern. We are, and we never think that some day some poor bird will try to decipher our technical works. Why, if Volta himself came back and saw the most perfect machine ever invented—the transformer—he'd shudder. No connection between input and output, several kinds of shorted loops of wire; and instead of making a nice simple electromagnet, we short the lines of force and on top of that we use a lot of laminations piled on top of one another instead of a nice, soft iron core. We completely short the input, et cetera, but how do we make with a gadget like that?"
"I know. We go on expecting to advance. We forget the simple past. Remember the lines of that story: 'How does one chip the flint to make the best arrowhead?' I don't know who wrote it any more than I know how to skin a boar, but we do get on without making arrowheads or skinning boars or trimming birch-bark canoes."
"All right, but there's still this problem."