He closed the switch, and the power demand meters jumped up across their scales. The gold-leaf electroscope jumped once; the ultra-thin leaves jerked apart by an inch, and then oscillated stiffly until they came to a balance. Channing, who had been looking at them, breathed deeply and smiled.
"We're getting out," he said.
"Can you key this?" asked Hadley.
"No need," said Channing. "They know we're in the grease. We know that if they can collect us, they'll be on their way. I'm going to send out for a half-hour, and then resort to a five-minute transmission every fifteen minutes. They'll get a ship after us with just about everything we're likely to need, and they can use the five-minute transmissions for direction finding. The initial shot will serve to give them an idea as to our direction. All we can do now is to wait."
"And hope," added Captain Johannson.
Electrically, Venus Equilateral was more silent than it had ever been. Not an electrical appliance was running on the whole station. People were cautioned about walking on deep-pile rugs, or combing their hair with plastic combs, or doing anything that would set up any kind of electronic charge. Only the highly filtered generators in the power rooms were running and these had been shielded and filtered long years ago; nothing would emerge from them to interrupt the ether. All incoming signals were stopped.
And the men who listened with straining ears claimed that the sky was absolutely clear save for a faint crackle of cosmic static which they knew came from the corona of the sun.
One group of men sat about a static-field indicator and cursed the minute wiggling of the meter, caused by the ever-moving celestial bodies and their electronic charges. A sunspot emission passed through the Station once, and though it was but a brief passage, it sent the electrostatic field crazy and made the men jump.
The men who were straining their ears to hear became nervous, and were jumping at every loud crackle.