A glow-bulb lighted in the interconnected tell-tale panel as a small bell rang. Roger, glancing at the panel, saw that the summons was from the electrical division downstairs. He went to the head of the steps.
“Want me?”
“Yes,” answered the voice of Professor Millman, electrical engineer. “We’re going to make a flat-table recording. I don’t just see where we get power for the motor from.”
“Right down close under the recording machine table,” Roger called down his information. “You’ll see an outlet set into the floor.”
“Oh—thanks, yes. I see.”
Roger went back to help Astrovox.
“Can’t risk it, with all the chemicals, and combustible stuff,” he answered the former phrases of the old astrologer.
“Not with Neptune, the planet, in opposition to Saturn and with Mars opposing Uranus,” the old man chuckled.
Roger looked as if he did not see the point.
“In our belief that the planetary positions influence chemical reactions—and all life is chemical, or, at least electro-chemical,” he was told, “we use the known planets as symbols for forces of nature. Saturn, you might say, stands for cohesion—or, better, say for crystallization, because Saturn makes gravity possible, makes density in our earth by cohering its quintrillions of atoms.