"Barney," said Don, "of all the companies, why did you pick on Terran Electric?"
"Gave us the best deal," said the huge, grinning man.
"Yeah, and they're getting the best of my goat right now."
"Well, Jim and I couldn't handle anything as big as the power transmission set-up. They paid out a large slice of jack for the complete rights. All of us are well paid now. After all, I'm primarily interested in Martian artifacts, you know."
"I wonder if they had lawyers," smiled Walt wryly.
"Probably. And, no doubt, the legals had a lot to do with the fall of the Martian Civilization."
"As it will probably get this one so bound up with red tape that progress will be impossible—or impractical."
"Well, Barney, let's take a run up to the lab. We can make paper-talk even if Brother Kingman won't let us set it to soldering iron. There are a lot of things I want to ask you about the tube."
They sat around a drawing table and Channing began to sketch. "What I'd hoped to do is this," he said, drawing a schematic diagram. "We're not interested in power transmission, but your gadget will do a bit of voltage amplification because of its utter indifference to the power-line problem of impedance matching. We can take a relay tube and put in ten watts, say, across ten thousand ohms. That means the input will be somewhat above three hundred volts. Now, if our output is raced across a hundred thousand ohms, ten watts will give us one thousand volts. So we can get voltage amplification at the expense of current—which we will not need. Unfortunately, the relay tube as well as the rest of the system will give out with the same kind of power that it is impressed with—so we'll have amplification of driver radiation. Then we'll need a detector. We haven't been able to get either yet, but this is a start, providing that Terran Electric will permit us to take a deep breath without wanting to pass on it."
"I think you may be able to get amplification," said Barney. "But to do it, you'll have to detect it first."