"Go on, Professor Maxwell."
"Don't make fun of a great man's name," said Arden. "If it wasn't for Clerk Maxwell, we'd still be yelling out of the window at one another instead of squirting radio beams all over the Solar System."
"Then make him quit calling me Tom Swift."
"Go on, Don, Walt and I will finish this argument after we finish Hellion Murdoch."
"May I?" asked Channing with a smile. He did not mind the interruption; he was used to it in the first place and he had been busy with his pencil in the second place. "Now look, Walt, what happens when you smack a charged condenser across an inductance?"
"You generate a damped cycle of the amplitude of the charge on the condenser, and of frequency equal to the L, C constants of the condenser and inductance. The amplitude decays according to the factor Q, following the equation for decrement—"
"Never mind, I've got it here on my whiteboard," smiled Channing, pointing to the tablecloth. "You are right. And the purity of the wave?"
"Sinusoidal ... hey! That's it!" Walt jumped to his feet and went to the telephone.
"What's 'it'?" asked Arden.
"The betatron we have runs off of a five-hundred-volt supply," chuckled Channing. "We can crank that up ten to one without running into any difficulty at all. Five-hundred-volt insulation is peanuts, and the stuff they put on wires nowadays is always good for ten times that just because it wouldn't be economical to try to thin the installation down so that it only protects five hundred. I'll bet a crank that he could crank the input up to fifty thousand volts without too much sputtering—though I wouldn't know where to lay my lunch hooks on a fifty-thousand-volt condenser of any appreciable capacity. Well, stepping up the rig ten to one will dish us out just shy of a couple of thousand million volts, which, as Brother Franks says, is not hay!"