"You think that was Hellion himself?"
"I'd bet money on it. The official report on Hellion Murdoch said that he was suffering from a persecution complex, and that he was capable of making something of it if he got the chance. He's slightly whacky, and dangerously so."
"He's a brilliant man, isn't he?"
"Quite. His name is well known in the circles of neurosurgery. He is also known to be an excellent research worker in applied physics."
"Nuts, hey?" asked Walt.
"Yeah, he's nuts. But only in one way, Walt. He's nuts to think that he is smarter than the entire solar system all put together. Well, what do we do now?"
"Butter ourselves well and start scratching for the answer. That betatron trick will not work twice. There must be something."
"O.K., Walt, we'll all help you think. I'm wondering how much research he had to do to develop that beam. After all, we were five thousand miles away, and he heated us up. He must've thought that we were a meteor—and another thing, too—he must've thought that his beam was capable of doing something at five thousand miles' distance or he wouldn't have tried. Ergo he must have beaten that two hundred mile bugaboo."
"We don't know that the two hundred mile bugaboo is still bugging in space," said Walt, slowly. "That's set up so that the ionization-by-products are not dangerous. Also, he's not transmitting power from station to station, et cetera. He's ramming power into some sort of beam and to the devil with losses external to his equipment. The trouble is, darn it, that we'll have to spend a month just building a large copy of my miniature set-up."
"A month is not too much time," agreed Channing. "And Murdoch will take a swing at us as soon as he gets ready to reach. We can have Chuck start building the big tubes immediately, can't we?"