"Mayor Hilliard found a little wood burner and gave it to me. I haven't had time to try converting our oil furnace."
Ken felt unable to stay awake longer. He went upstairs to bed for a few hours. Later, his mother brought a dinner tray. "Do you want it here, or would you rather come down where it's warm?" she asked.
"I'll come down. I want to get up for a while."
"Maria is out in the shack. She has a scheduled contact with Berkeley, but she says the transmitter won't function. It looks like a burned-out tube to her. She wanted to call Joe."
Ken scrambled out of bed and grabbed for his clothes. "I'll take care of it. Save dinner for me. We've got to keep the station on the air, no matter what happens!"
He found Maria seated by the desk, listening to the Berkeley operator's repeated call, to which she could not reply. The girl wore a heavy cardigan sweater, which was scarcely sufficient for the cold in the room. The small, tin-can heater was hardly noticeable.
Maria looked up as Ken burst through the doorway. "I didn't want you to come," she said. "They could have called Joe."
"We can't risk disturbing our schedule. They might think we've gone under and we'd lose our contact completely."
Hastily he examined the tube layout and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw it was merely one of the 801's that had burned a filament. They had a good stock of spares. He replaced the tube and closed the transmitter cage. After the tubes had warmed up, and the Berkeley operator paused to listen for their call, Ken picked up the microphone and threw in the antenna switch.
"Mayfield calling Berkeley." He repeated this several times. "Our transmitter's been out with a bum bottle. Let us know if you read us now." He repeated again and switched back to the receiver.