"Would you rather hear it from him or me?" Arden asked.
"He'll tell me," said Christine. Her voice was positive and assured.
"And that'll take care of that," said Arden. "But I think we interrupted something. What were you saying about gaining, Walt?"
"Oh, I was saying that I was tinkering around with the Anopheles. We hooked it up with the solar beam for power, and I got to wondering about that discrepancy. The faster you go, the greater is the angular displacement, and then with some measurements, I came up with a bugger factor—"
"Whoa, goodness," laughed Christine. "What is a bugger factor?"
"You'll learn," said Arden, "that the boys out here have a language all their own. I've heard them use that one before. The bugger factor is a sort of multiplying, or dividing, or additive, or subtractive quantity. You perform the mathematical operation with the bugger factor, and your original wrong answer turns into the right answer."
"Is it accepted?"
"Oh, sure," answered Arden. "People don't realize it, but that string of 4's in the derivation of Bode's law is a bugger factor."
"You," said Christine to Walt, "will also tell me what Bode's law is—but later."
"O.K.," grinned Walt. "At any rate, I came up with a bugger factor that gave me to think. The darned solar beam points to where Sol actually is!"