"You mean—Hey! Remind me to quit Saturday."
"This is dead in earnest, Walt." Don told the engineer all he knew.
"Boy, this is a job I wouldn't want my life to depend on. In the first place, we can't beam a transmitter at them if we can't see 'em. And in the second place, if we did, they couldn't receive us."
"We can get a good idea of where they are and how they're going," said Channing. "That is common knowledge."
"Astronomy is an exact science," chanted Franks. "But by the time we figure out just where the Empress of Kolain is with respect to us at any given instant we'll all be old men with gray beards. She's crossing toward us on a skew curve—and we'll have to beam it past Sol. It won't be easy, Don. And then if we do find them, what do we do about it?"
"Let's find them first and then work out a means of contacting them afterwards."
"Don," interrupted Arden, "what's so difficult?"
Franks fell backward into a chair. Don turned to the girl and asked: "Are you kidding?"
"No. I'm just ignorant. What is so hard about it? We shoot beams across a couple of hundred million miles of space like nothing and maintain communications at any cost. What should be so hard about contacting a ship?"
"In the first place, we can see a planet, and they can see us, so they can hold their beams. A spaceship might be able to see us, but they couldn't hold a beam on us because of the side sway. We couldn't see them until they are right upon us and so we could not hope to hold a beam on them. Spaceships might broadcast, but you have no idea what the square law of radiated power will do to a broadcast signal when millions upon millions of miles are counted in. A half million watts on any planet will not quite cover the planet as a service area on broadcast frequencies. But there's a lot of difference between covering a few stinking miles of planet and a volume the size of the Inner Solar System. So they don't try it. A spaceship may as well be on Rigel as far as contacting her in space goes.