The sound of a phonograph pick-up being dropped on a record preceded Freddie's voice saying: "One, two, three, four, test, one—"
Channing cut the gain again. "That red-hot. I thought he was talking all this time."
"Not the Thomas Boys. That comes under the classification of 'Work' which they shun unless they cannot get any kind of machine to do it for them," laughed Walt.
Walt turned the dials back to the unearthly symphony. "At C², that might come from Sirius," he said, listening carefully. "Sounds like Chinese."
"Oh, now look," objected Don. "What on earth would a Chinese Symphony be doing with a driver modulator system?"
"Broadcasting—"
"Nope. The idea of detecting driver radiation is as old as the hills. If any culture had uncovered driver-beam transmission we'd all have been aware of it. So far as I know, we and the Terran Electric crowd are the only ones who have had any kind of an opportunity of working with this sub-etheric energy. Wes, have you another miniature of the relay tube handy?"
"Sure. Why?"
"I'm going to see if this stuff can be made directional. You're bringing whatever it is into the place on a collector plate and slamming it into an input-terminal power transmission tube. It goes across the table to the relay tube, and is amplified, and then is tossed across more table to the load-terminal tube, where the output is impressed across your alloy-disk. Right?"
"Right."