That was all for about an hour. Meanwhile, the mewling tones burst forth again and again, assaulting the ears with intent to do damage. The messages were terse and for the most part uninteresting. They gave the market reports: they intercepted the beam transmissions through the Terran Heaviside Layer before they got through the Lunar Relay Station, inspected the swiftly-moving tape and transmitted the juicy morsels to Kingman via the big driver tube that stood poised outside of the landed spaceship.
Kingman enjoyed an hour of celebration at Addison's success, and then the joy turned to bitter hate as the message came through telling of the ozone that resulted in the passage of the solar beam through the atmosphere. The success of the beam, and the utter impossibility of using it were far worse than the original fact of the beam's failure to pass the Channing Layer.
So Kingman went back to his stock market machinations and applied himself diligently. And as the days wore on, Kingman's group manipulated their watered stock and ran the price up and down at will, and after each cycle Kingman's outfit owned just one more bit of Venus Equilateral.
Terran Electric would emerge from this battle with Venus Equilateral as a subsidiary—with Kingman at the helm!
Walt Franks entered Channing's office with a wild-eyed look on his face. "Don! C²!"
"Huh! What are you driving about?"
"C². The speed of light, squared!"
"Fast—but what is it?"
"The solar beam! It propagates at C²!"
"Oh, now look. Nothing can travel that fast!"