Kingman alternately cursed the whining music and cheered the pyramiding stock. About the only thing that kept Kingman from going completely mad was the fact that the alien music was not continuous, but it came and went in stretches of anything from five to fifty minutes, with varied periods for silence in between selections.
Up and up it went, and Kingman was seeing the final, victorious coup in the offing. A week more, and Venus Equilateral would belong to Terran Electric. The beam from Terra was silent, save for a few items of interest not connected with the market. Kingman's men were given the latest news, baseball scores, and so forth, among which items was another message to Channing from the solar beam project engineer, Addison. They had about given up. Nothing they could do would prevent the formation of ozone by the ton as they drew power by the kilowatt from Sol.
On Venus Equilateral, Channing said: "Ask Freddie what his radio frequency is."
Ten minutes later, at the speed of light, the ship beam reached the Relay Girl and the message clicked out. Freddie read it and spoke into the microphone. The Relay Girl bucked unmercifully, as the voice amplitude made the acceleration change. Then at the speed of light, squared, the answer came back in less than a twinkle.
"Seventeen hundred kilocycles."
Channing began to turn the tuner of the radio receiver. The band was dead, and he laughed. "This is going to be tricky, what with the necessity of aligning both the driver-alloy disk and the radio receiver. Takes time."
He changed the alloy disk in minute increments, and waved the tuner across that portion of the band that would most likely cover the experimental error of Freddie Thomas' frequency measurement. A burst of sound caught his ear, was lost for a moment, and then swelled into perfect tune as Don worked over the double tuning system.
"Whoa, Tillie," said Walt. "That sounds like—"
"Like hell."
"Right. Just what I was going to say. Is it music?"