"In the meantime, we measure the electrical constants to within an inch of their lives," he told her. "I've got a couple of real fancy meters here—this one that I'm hooking across the original wattmeter in the circuit measures the wattages in the region between one hundred thousand kilowatts and one hundred ten thousand kilowatts. Designed especially as a high-level meter."
Walt clipped the portable meters in place and made recordings. Finally he nodded. "Right on the button," he said. "Just what the meters should read."
The crystal began to vibrate faintly, and Walt mentioned that either Wes Farrell was calling Freddie Thomas or vice versa. "Can't hear it very well," complained Walt, "because Wes has the amplifiers downstairs, both incoming amplifier from the dynamic pick-up—we had to give up the standard crystal because it is expected to get cold enough to make the crystal too brittle—-to the modulating equipment. The monitor-speaker is outside—we haven't been in here enough to make use of it since our first tries."
Walt took a look at the bridge on the thermocouple and nodded vaguely. He killed more time by showing Christine the huge tube that drained the latent heat out of the room and hurled it across the solar system to Pluto.
"Y'know," he grinned as a thought struck him, "I think we've licked the Channing Layer that so neatly foiled Mark Kingman and Terran Electric on that solar power project."
"Yes?"
"Sure," he said. "All we do is set up a real beam-input device on the moon, for instance, and then use a batch of these things to draw the power from there."