Jeanne left, with Walt right behind her. Franks did not remain at the desk, however, but made his way from the office level to the outer skin of the Relay Station by way of a not-often-used stairway that permitted him to drop to the outer skin. Above his head were the first levels of apartmental cubicles occupied by the personnel of Venus Equilateral. Out here, Walt had but a scant thickness of steel between him and the void of space.
His pathway was strewn with pipe, cable, and storage tanks. He passed a long-forgotten project and paused to reminisce over the days when a meteor shower had caused them some concern by puncturing the skin twice. The installation of a sponge elastomer under compression in this space had been stopped when a brilliant astrophysicist proved to Channing—then a supervisor in the operations laboratory—that the chances of being dangerously punctured were practically nil, and that the actual puncturing had done nothing but make people uncomfortably leery.
Then Franks came to a room built from outer skin to inner skin and about fifty feet in diameter. He unlocked the door with a key on his watch chain, and entered. Jim Warren was waiting for him.
"Hi, ordnance expert. We're ready as soon as they are."
"How's she working?"
"I should know? We've been squirting ropes of electrons out to blank space for hours. She gets rid of them all right. But have we done any good? I dunno."
"Not a meteor in sight, I suppose."
"The detector hasn't blinked once. But when she does, your electron gun will follow the darned thing until it gets a half thousand miles out of sight, or will pick it up a thousand miles before it gets here."
"That sounds fine. It's a good thing that we don't have to swivel that mess of tube around a whole arc in actual use. It would take too long. But we'll put one in each upper quadrant of a spaceship and devise it so that its working arc will be small enough to make it work. Time enough to find that out after we know if it works."