"Until we get a chance to tinker with those tubes, we won't get ship-to-ship two ways. So we'll gadgeteer up something that will make Terran Electric foam at the mouth, and swap a hunk of it for full freedom in our investigations. Or should we bust Terran Electric wholeheartedly?"
"Let's slug 'em," said Walt.
"Go ahead," said Wes. "I'm utterly disgusted, though I think our trouble is due to the management of Terran Electric. They like legal tangles too much."
"We'll give 'em a legal tangle," said Barney. He was adding circuits to the tablecloth sketch.
Channing, on his side, was sketching in some equations, and Walt was working out some mechanical details. Joe came over, looked at the tablecloth, and forthright went to the telephone and called Warren. The mechanical designer came, and Channing looked up in surprise. "Hi," he said, "I was just about to call you."
"Joe did."
"O.K. Look, Warren, can you fake up a gadget like this?"
Warren looked the thing over. "Give me about ten hours," he said. "We've got a spare turnover driver from the Relay Girl that we can hand-carve. There are a couple of water-boilers that we can strip, cut open, and make to serve as the top end. How're you hoping to maintain the vacuum?"
"Yes," said Wes Farrell, "that's going to be the problem. If there's any adjusting of electrodes to do, this'll take months."
"That's why we, on Venus Equilateral, are ahead of the whole ding-busted Solar System in tube development," said Don. "We'll run the thing out in the open—and I do mean open! Instead of the tube having the insides exhausted, the operators will have their envelopes served with fresh, canned air."