"Hadley, how much coating have we got on those cathodes?" asked Don Channing.
"Not too much. We had about twenty G hours to begin with. We went to a half G for twenty hours, and now we're running on a quarter G, which would let us go for forty hours more."
"Well, look. If it should come to a choice between floor and signal gun, we'll choose the gun. We've about eight hours left in the cathodes, and since everybody is now used to quarter G we might even slide it down to an eighth G, which would give us about sixteen hours."
"Your gun is still putting out?"
"So far as I can tell. Six hours from now, we should know, I think, predicating my guess on whatever meager information they must have."
"We could save some juice by killing most of the lights in the ship."
"That's a thought. Johannson, have one of your men run around and remove all lights that aren't absolutely necessary. He can kill about three-quarters of them, I'm certain. That'll save us a few kilowatt hours," said Channing. "And another thing. I'm about to drop the power of our electron gun and run it continuously. If the boys are anywhere in the neighborhood, they'll be needing continuous disturbance for direction finding. I'd say in another five hours that we should start continuous radiation."
"You know, Channing, if this thing works out all right, it will be a definite vote for pure, deductive reasoning."
"I know. But the deductive reasoning is not too pure. It isn't guesswork. There are two factors of known quality. One is that I know Walt Franks and the other is that he knows me. The rest is a simple matter of the boys on the station knowing space to the last inch, and applying the theory of probabilities to it. We'll hear from them soon, or I'll miss my guess. Just you wait."