"Must be fairly large," suggested Timkins.
"Sure—according to man-made standards. Celestially, it might be a mere scrap of dirt. A sub-sub-sub-microscopic bit of cosmic dust less than a hundred miles in diameter."
"Ugh," grunted Larry. "You make man and his works sort of insignificant."
"We are. Do the planets care what we do on their miles-thick hides? Do the suns care that we wonder at them? Does the cosmos give a rap that we chase from planet to planet and from sun to sun?"
"You make it sound as though they are capable of thinking."
"If they did, we wouldn't know about it; and they wouldn't know we existed. Proportionally, man is smaller than the filterable virus. So we have a slab of cupralum, which is—according to Mac—Here! That's fine. It blankets Telfu like a complete shroud, as far as the good old gravitics go."
Larry Timkins looked up from a page of scrawled equations. "A slab of cupralum a hundred miles in diameter, rotating in the mechanogravitic field thrown out by Sirius would certainly soak up every bit of power. Must be a slick tie-in. The gravitron puts our O.K. on a resistive load. Hooked to the drive, everything goes phhht."
"Sure. That's part of the trouble. It's the drive, coupled with the general gravitic interference cut up by Soaky."
"Soaky?"
"I have hung a name on the satellite. Heretofore it has been nameless. We have named it Soaky."