Murdoch's ship touched the landing stage just after the charge had been driven out into space. The heavy negative charge on the Hippocrates met the heavy positive charge on Venus Equilateral. The ship touched, and from that contact, there arose a cloud of incandescent gas. The entire charge left the ship at once, and through that single contact. When the cloud dissipated, the contact was a crude but efficient welded joint that was gleaming white-hot.
Channing said to Walt: "That's going to be messy."
Inside of the Hippocrates, men were still frozen to their handholds. It was messy, and cleaning up the Hippocrates was a job not relished by those who did it.
But cleaning up Venus Equilateral was no small matter either.
Weeks went by before the snarled-up instruments were repaired. Weeks in which the captured Hippocrates was repaired, too, and used to transport material and special supplies from Terra, and Venus, and Mars. Weeks in which the service from planet to planet was interrupted and erratic.
Then one day, service was restored, and life settled down to a reasonable level. It was after this time that Walt and Channing found time to spend an idle hour together. Walt raised his glass and said: "Here's to electrons!"
"Yeah," grinned Channing. "Here's to electrons. Y'know, Walt, I was a little afraid that space might become a sort of wild West show, with the ships bristling with space guns and betatrons and stuff like that. In which case you'd have been a stinking benefactor. But if the recoil is as bad as the output—and Newton said that it must be—I can't see ships cluttering up their insides with stuff that'll screw up their instruments and driver tubes. But the thing that amuses me about the whole thing is the total failure you produced."
"Failure?" asked Walt. "What failed?"
"Don't you know? Have you forgotten? Do you realize that spaceships are still ducking around meteors instead of blasting them out of the way with the Franks Electron Gun? Or did you lose sight of the fact that this dingbat started out in life as a meteor-sweeper?"