"All right, then. So we blew something. Can't we run it down?"
"Trouble is that we blew too many things at the same time."
"Don't understand."
"Naturally," snapped the pilot. "You know less about this stuff than I do. This is supposed to be more than thirty-six hundred, providing that is functioning. But the voltage will go above seven thousand if the other has come unglued. If you blow both items, together, the voltage downed by one and upped by the other comes out to about four thousand. The reading may be all right, but when everything in the damned set reads wrong, I have to give up."
"So what do we do now?"
Norton shrugged. "We hope they don't give up. We keep on working on this thing. We—Hell, we might as well turn on the receiver and listen."
"Can we spare the power?"
Norton looked at the financier. "Might as well," he said. "We might as well. If they abandon this search because we aren't transmitting, we might as well waste the power anyway...."
Viggon Sarri faced his lieutenants. "From Brein's report," he announced, "they finished their grid search some three hours ago, and have been milling around in stacked pattern ever since. Linus predicts that they have been waiting for a recurrence of the regularly transmitted signal that should have kept coming but which blew out from some sort of overload. Within the half-hour, they have reformed their search pattern and seem inclined to continue, even though it should appear obvious to them that their friends have lost their ability to transmit."