"Call Chuck and have him begin to concoct an RF stage for tube-modulation," said Don. "It'll have to be fairly low—not higher than a couple of megacycles so that he can handle it with the stuff he has available, but as long as we can hear his dulcet voice chirping that 'one, two, three, four, test,' of his, we can also have ship-to-station two-way. We squirt out on the ship beam, and he talks back on the driver transmitter."
"That'll be a help," observed Wes. "I'd been thinking by habit that we had no way to get word back from the Relay Girl."
"So had I," confessed Walt. "But we'll get over that."
"Meanwhile, I'm going to get this alloy-selectivity investigated right down to the last nub," said Don. "Chuck's gang can take it from all angles and record their findings. We'll ultimately be able to devise a system of mathematics for it from their analysis. You won't mind being bothered every fifteen minutes for the first week, will you, Wes? They'll be running to you in your sleep with questions until they catch up with your present level of ability in this job. Eventually they'll pass you up, and then you'll have to study their results in order to keep up."
"Suits me. That sounds like my job, anyway."
"It is. O.K., Arden, I'm coming now."
"It's about time," smiled Arden. "I wouldn't haul you away from your first love excepting that I know you haven't eaten in eight or nine hours. I've got roast knolla."
"S'long, fellows," grinned Channing. "I'm one of the few guys in the inner system who can forget that the knolla is the North Venus brother to a pussy cat."
"I could feed you pussy cat and you'd eat it if I called it knolla," said Arden. "But you wouldn't eat knolla if I called it pussy cat."
"You can't tell the difference," said Walt.