"Yeah, you're right. O.K., so we can't take out that cylinder of space. And we add a sort of side-wise cone on to our original cone, a volume through which the Queen might have flown after passing close enough to Terra to be deflected. I'll have the slipstick experts give a guess as to the probability of the Queen's course, and at the same time we'll suspend all incoming operations. I'm going to set up every kind of detector I can think of, and I don't want anything upsetting them."
"What kind of stuff do you expect?" asked Arden.
"I dunno. They might have a betatron aboard. In that case we'll eventually get a blast of electrons that'll knock our front teeth out. Don may succeed in tinkering up some sort of electrostatic field. We can check the solar electrostatic field to about seven decimal places right here, and any deviation in the field to the tune of a couple of million electron volts at a distance of a hundred million miles will cause a distortion in the field that we can measure. We'll ply oscillating beams through the area of expectation and hope for an answering reflection, though I do not hope for that. We'll have men on the lookout for everything from smoke signals to helio. Don't worry too much, Arden, your husband is capable of doing something big enough to be heard. He's just the guy to do it."
"I know," said Arden soberly. "But I can't help worrying."
"Me, too. Well, I'm off to set up detectors. We'll collect something."
"Have we got anything like a piece of gold leaf?" asked Channing.
"I think so, why?"
"I want to make an electroscope. That's about the only way I'll know whether we are getting out with this cockeyed electron gun."
"How so?" asked Hadley.