"O.K., Don," said the project engineer. "We'll have to do some more work on it. It's nothing of your doing."
Mark Kingman's face was green again, but he nodded in agreement. "We seem to have a useless job here, but we'll think of something."
They studied the barrier and established its height as a constant three hundred and thirty-nine, point seven six miles above Terra's mythical sea level. It was almost a perfect sphere, that did not change with the night and day, as did the Heaviside Layer. There was no way to find out how thick it was, but thickness was of no importance, since it effectively stopped the beam.
Then as Don Channing stepped aboard the Princess of the Sky to get home again, the project engineer said: "If you don't mind, I think we'll call that one the Channing Layer!"
"Yeah," grinned Don, pleased at the thought, "and forever afterward it will stand as a cinder in the eye of Terran Electric."
"Oh," said the project engineer, "we'll beat the Channing Layer."
But the project engineer was a bum prophet—
Interlude:
Baffled and beaten, Mark Kingman returned to Terran Electric empty handed. He hated science and the men who revelled in it, though he was not above using science—and the men who revelled in it—to further his own unscientific existence. The poetic justice that piled blow upon blow on his unprotected head was lost on Mark Kingman and he swore eternal vengeance.