"Why?"
"Because we've been tinkering with driver tubes for years and years—and we have also been gadgeting up detectors, radio hootnannies, and stuff of the electronic spectrum all the way from direct current to hard X-rays, and we have yet to have anything react to driver radiation. Ergo, I'm skeptical."
The call bell rang for Channing, and he answered. It was Walt Franks.
"Don," he said with a laugh in his voice, though it was apparent that he felt slightly guilty about laughing, "got a 'gram from Addison, the project engineer on the solar beam from Terran Electric. Says: 'Finally got through Channing Layer. Power by the megawatt hour in great shape. But the atmosphere from the Channing Layer right down to the snout of the tube is a dull red scintillation. Like the driver tube trail—it ionizes the atmosphere into ozone. Power by the megawatt, and ozone by the megaton.'"
"Ozone, hey? Lots of it?"
"Plenty, according to the rest of this. It looks to me like a sort of 'denatured' power system. There it is, all nice and potent, cheap, and unlicensed. But the second swallow going down meets the first one on the way back. Power they got—but the ozone they can't take; it's poisonous like a nice dose of chlorine. Poor Terran Electric!"
Mark Kingman sat in the control room of a ship of space and worried. Below the dome, Venus covered three-quarters of the sky, and it circled slowly as the Terran Electric ship oscillated gently up and down.
Before Kingman, on the desk, were pages of stock market reports. On a blackboard, a jagged line denoted the vacillation of Venus Equilateral Preferred. This phase of his plan was working to perfection. Gradually, he was buying share after share out of uninterested hands by his depredations. Soon he would have enough stock to stage a grand show, and then he could swing the thing his way.
His worry was not with this affair.