"By the time we get something big enough to do more than knock paint off, we'll have something bigger than a twenty-two," grinned Channing. "I was speaking in terms of available strength versus required punch. In the way that a girder will hold tremendous overloads for brief instants, a gun is extremely overloaded for milliseconds. We'll have a problem—"
"O.K., aside from that, have you figured out why I haven't been able to do more than warm anything larger than a house brick?"
"Sure," laughed Channing. "What happens in a multigrid radio tube when the suppressor grid is hanging free?"
"Charges up and blocks the electron stream ... hey! That's it!"
"What?" asked Arden.
"Sure," said Walt. "We fire off a batch of electrons, and the first contingent that arrives charges the affair so that the rest of the beam sort of wriggles out of line."
"Your meteor is going to take on a charge of phenomenal negative value, and the rest of your beam is going to be deflected away, just as your electron lenses deflect the original beam," said Channing. "And now another thing, old turnip. You're squirting out a lot of electrons. That's much amperage. Your voltage—velocity—is nothing to rave about. Watts is what you want, to corn a phrase."
"Phew," said Walt. "Corn, he says. Go on, prodigy, and make with the explanations. I agree, we should have more voltage and less quantity. But we're running the stuff at plenty of voltage now. Nothing short of a Van Der Graf generator would work—and while we've got one up on the forty-ninth level, we couldn't run a supply line down here without reaming a fifty-foot hole through the Station, and then I don't know how we'd get that kind of voltage down here without ... that kind of stuff staggers the imagination. You can't juggle a hundred million volts on a wire. She'd squirt off in all directions."
"Another thing, whilst I hold it in my mind," said Channing thoughtfully. "You go flinging electrons off the Station in basketful after basketful, and the next bird that drops a ship on the landing stage is going to spot-weld himself right to the South end of Venus Equilateral. It wouldn't be long before the Station would find itself being pulled into Sol because of the electrostatic stress—if we didn't run out of electrons first!"
"I hardly think that we'd run out—but we might have a tough time flinging them away after a bit. Could be that we should blow out a fist full of positrons at the same time?"