"Yeah, but we'd all land in the hoosegow for breaking the secrecy legislation. You know. 'No one shall ... intercept ... transmit ... eavesdrop upon ... any message not intended for the listener, and ... shall not ... be party to the use of any information gained ... et cetera.' That's us. The trouble is this lag between the worlds. They can prearrange their bulling and bearing ahead of time and play smart. With a little luck, they can get the three markets working just so—going up at Northern Landing; down at Terra; and up again at Canalopsis, just like waves in a rope. By playing fast and loose on paper, they can really run things hell, west and crooked. Illegal, probably, since they each no doubt will claim to have all the stock in their possession, and yet will be able to sell and buy the same stock at the same time in three places."
"Sounds slightly precarious to me," objected Cartwright.
"Not at all, if you figure things just right. At a given instant, Pete may be buying at sixty-five on Venus; Joe might be selling like furious at seventy-one on Mars; and Jimmy may be bucking him up again by buying at sixty-five on Terra. Then the picture and the tickers catch up with one another, and Joe will start buying again at sixty-five, whilst Pete and Jimmy are selling at seventy-one. Once they get their periodicity running, they're able to tinker the market for quite a time. That's where your man comes in, Bill. Have him study the market and step in at the right time and grab us all a few cheap ones. Get me?"
"Sure," said Cartwright. "I get it. In that way, we'll tend to stabilize the market, as well as getting the other guy's shares."
"Right. I'll leave it up to you. Handle this thing for the best interests of all of us."
Cartwright smiled once again, and left with a thoughtful expression on his face. Channing picked up the miniature of the power-transmission tube and studied it as though the interruption had not occurred. "We'll have to use about four of these per stage," he said. "We'll have to use an input terminal tube to accept the stuff from the previous stage, drop it across the low-resistance load, resistance couple the stage to another output terminal tube where we can make use of the coupling circuits without feedback. From there into the next tube, with the high resistance load, and out of the power-putter-outer tube across the desk to the next four-bottle stage."
"That's getting complicated," said Walt. "Four tubes per stage of amplification."
"Sure. As the arts and sciences get more advanced, things tend to get more complicated."
"That's essentially correct," agreed Walt with a smile. "But you're foreguessing. We haven't even got a detector that will detect driver radiation."
"I know, and perhaps this thing will not work. But after all, we've got the tubes and we might just as well try them out just in case. We'll detect driver radiation soon enough and then we might as well have a few odd thoughts on how to amplify it for public use. Nothing could tickle me more than to increase those three circles on our letterhead to four. 'Planet to Planet, and Ship to Ship' is our hope. This one-way business is not to my liking. How much easier it would have been if I'd been able to squirt a call in to the station when I was floating out there beyond Jupiter in that wrecked ship. That gave me to think, Walt. Driver radiation detection is the answer."