But Don Channing's luck was running low. On arriving at Lincoln Head, he discovered that Baler and Carroll had packed up their tube and left for Terra. Keg Johnson knew about it; he informed Channing that the foremost manufacturer of electrical apparatus had offered a lucrative bid for the thing as it stood and that Big Jim Baler had grinned, saying that the money that the Terran Electric Company was tossing around would permit the two of them, Carroll and himself, to spend the rest of their lives digging around the artifacts of Mars in style.
So Channing sent word to Venus Equilateral and told them to get in touch with either the Baler-Carroll combine or Terran Electric and make dicker.
Then he started to make the journey back to Venus Equilateral on the regular spacelanes....
[OFF THE BEAM]
Thirty hours out of Mars for Terra, the Ariadne sped along her silent, invisible course. No longer was she completely severed from all connection with the planets of the inner system; the trick cams that controlled the beams at Venus Equilateral kept the ship centered by sheer mathematics in spite of her thirty hours at two G, which brought her velocity to eleven hundred miles per second.
What made this trip ironic was the fact that Don Channing was aboard. The beams had been bombarding the Ariadne continually ever since she left Mars with messages for the Director of Communications. In one sense, it seemed funny that Channing was for once on the end of a communications line where people could talk to him but from which he could not talk back. On the other hand, it was a blessing in disguise, for the Director of Communications was beginning to paper-talk himself into some means of contacting Venus Equilateral from a spaceship.
A steward found Channing in the salon and handed him a 'gram. Channing smiled, and the steward returned the smile and added: "You'll fix these ships to talk back one day. Wait till you read that one—you'll burn from here to Terra!"
"Reading my mail?" asked Channing cheerfully. The average spacegram was about as secret as a postcard, so Channing didn't mind. He turned the page over and read:
HOPE YOU'RE WELL FILLED WITH GRAVANOL AND ADHESIVE TAPE FOR YOUR JUMP FROM TERRA TO STATION. SHALL TAKE GREAT DELIGHT IN RIPPING ADHESIVE TAPE OFF YOUR MEASLY BODY. LOVE.