There were mingled cheers and laughter as the speaker system broke away from babel, and each group spoke its piece with no interference. Walt Franks left the ship at the south end and raced to the beam control dome, just as fast as the runway car would take him. He ran into the dome in spacesuit and flipped the helmet back over his shoulder, "What kind of indication?" he yelled.
Men crowded around him, offering him papers and showing figures.
"Gosh," he said, "Don can't have everything going up there."
"He's hit just about everything but the guy squinting through the 'scope."
"What's he doing?" asked Franks of nobody in particular.
Charles Thomas, who had been busy with the electrostatic field indicator said: "I think maybe he's using some sort of electron gun—like the one you tried first off on the meteor destroyer job, remember?"
"Yeah, but that one wouldn't work—unless Don has succeeded in doing something we couldn't do. Look, Chuck, we haven't had time to set up a complete field indicator on the ship—grab yours and give the boys a lift installing it, hey?"
"Sure thing," said Thomas.
"And look, fellows, any indication of direction, velocity, or distance?"
"Look for yourself," said the man on the beam scanner. "The whole plate is shining. We can't get a fix on them this way—they're radiating themselves and that means our scanner-system finder is worthless."