Then service was restored, and life settled down to a reasonable level. It was after this that Walt and Channing found time to spend an idle hour together. Walt raised his glass and said: "Here's to electrons!"
"Yeah," grinned Channing, "here's to electrons. Y'know, Walt, I was a little afraid that space might become a sort of Wild West show, with the ships bristling with space guns and betatrons and stuff like that. In which case you'd have been a stinking benefactor. But if the recoil is as bad as the output—and Newton said that it must be—I can't see ships cluttering up their insides with stuff that'll screw up their instruments and driver tubes. But the thing that amuses me about the whole thing is the total failure you produced."
"Failure?" asked Walt. "What failed?"
"Don't you know? Have you forgotten? Do you realize that spaceships are still ducking around meteors instead of blasting them out of the way with the Franks Electron Gun? Or did you lose sight of the fact that this dingbat started out in life as a meteor-sweeper?"
Walt glared over the rim of his glass, but he had nothing to say.
Interlude:
Once the threat of piracy was over, Don Channing had an opportunity to think once more of the much-talked-about tube that had been found on the Martian Desert by Carroll and Baler. Predicated as a general rule, any medium used for the transmission of energy can be used as a means to transmit messages—intelligence, to use the more technical term. The reverse is not true, practically.
And since Don Channing's initial problem during these days was to devise means of two-way communication from ship to planet—if not ship to ship—he immediately returned to Mars to seek out Messrs. Baler and Carroll.
Strangely enough, the problem of communicating from planet to ship was not solved—nor would it be complete until some means of returning messages was devised. For the cams that kept the ship beams pointed to the place where the invisible spaceship was supposed to be had no way of knowing when the ship might swerve to miss a meteor. Many were the messages that went into space—undelivered—because a ship dodged a meteor that might have been dangerous. Postulating the rather low possibility of danger made little difference. Misdirected messages were of less importance than even the remote danger of death in the skies.