"Ben, as far as I know, that relay is what Channing and his gang would give their whole station for—and will, soon enough. I don't care how it works—or why!"
"That's no way to make progress," objected Ben.
"Yeah, but we've got the only detector for driver radiation in this part of the universe! I'm not going to have it wrecked by a screwball engineer who doesn't give a care what's going on as long as he can tinker with something new and different. What do we know about it? Nothing. Therefore how can you learn anything about it? What would you look for? What would you expect to find?"
"But where is that music coming from?"
"I don't know. As best as we can calculate, driver radiation propagates at the square of the speed of light, and that gives us a twenty-four minute edge on Venus Equilateral at the present time. For all I know, that music may be coming from the other end of the galaxy. At the square of the speed of light, you could talk to Centauri and get an answer in not too long."
"But if we had a chance to tinker with that relay, we might be able to find out what tunes it and then we can tune in the Lunar station and tune out that cat-melody."
"I'm running this show—and this relay is going to stay right where it is. I don't care a hoot about the control circuit it breaks; these controls are set, somehow, so that we can detect driver radiations and I'm not taking any chances of having it ruined."
"Can't you turn the gain down, at least?"
"Nope. We'd miss the gang at Luna."
The speaker spoke in that faint, flat-toned human voice again. It was easy to see that all that gain was necessary to back up the obviously faint response of Kingman's detector. The speaker said: "Kingman! Addison got power through the Channing Layer!"