Interlude:

When necessity dictates a course of action and the course of action proves valuable, it is but a short step to the inclusion of the answer into the many facets of modern technical civilization. Thus it was that not many months after Venus Equilateral successfully established planet-to-ship communications with the "Empress of Kolain" that all course constants were delivered to the relay station and thereafter messages were transmitted as a part of the regular business of Interplanetary Communications.

This, of course, offered another problem. Ships in space were in the position of being able to catch messages but were not able to answer back. It would take, perhaps, another emergency to set up conditions which demanded the reverse of the problem of contacting a ship in space.

But there was a more immediate problem. Spacecraft were protected from meteors by means of radar that was coupled to the steering panels of the ships; when a meteor threatened, the ship merely turned aside by that fraction of a degree that gave it safety.

It took, however, but a few meteors, and the resulting few fractions of a degree to shunt the swiftly moving ship out of the coverage-area of the ship-seeking beams from Venus Equilateral. Then the power and ingenuity of Venus Equilateral was wasted on vacant space and the messages intended for the ships went undelivered.

Since the ship must avoid meteors, and the meteors could not be diverted from their courses, there was but one answer: Swerve the ship and let the messages go hang, for a message is of no use to a riddled spacecraft!

But, thought several people, if the meteor cannot be steered, perhaps it might be removed....

RECOIL

Walter Franks sat in the director's office; his feet on the director's desk. He was smoking one of the director's cigarettes. He was drinking the director's liquor, filched shamelessly from the director's private filing cabinet where it reposed in the drawer marked "S." Drawer "B" would have given beer, but Walt preferred Scotch.

He leaned forward and dropped the director's cigarette into the director's wastebasket and then he pressed the button on the desk and looked up.

But it was not the director's secretary who entered. It was his own, but that did not disturb Franks. He knew that the director's ex-secretary was off on Mars enjoying a honeymoon with the director.

Jeanne entered and smiled. "Must you call me in here to witness you wasting the company's time?" she asked in mock anger.

"Now look, Jeanne, this is what Channing does."

"No dice. You can't behave as Don Channing behaves. The reason is my husband."

"I didn't call to have you sit on my lap. I want to know if the mail is in."

"I thought so," she said. "And I brought it in with me. Anything more?"

"Not until you get a divorce," laughed Franks.

"You should live so long," she said with a smile. She stuck her tongue out at him.

Walt thumbed his way through the mail, making notations on some, and setting others aside for closer reading. He came to one and tossed it across the desk at Jeanne. She took the message and read:

But the crew was in no shape to appreciate this display. From metal parts in the ship there appeared coronas that reached for the unprotected men, and seared their flesh. And since their gravity-apparent was gone, they floated freely through the air, and came in contact with highly charged walls, ceilings and floors; to say nothing of the standard metal furniture.

It was a sorry bunch of pirates that found themselves in a ship-without-motive-power that was beginning to leave their circular course on a tangent that would let them drop into the Sun.

"That's my answer, Murdoch!" snapped Channing. "Watch your second ship!"

"You young devil!" snarled Murdoch. "What did you do?"

"You never thought that it would be an electronics engineer that made the first energy gun, did you, Murdoch? I'm now going to take a shot at No. 3!"

No. 3's turrets swiveled around and from the guns flashes of fire came streaming. Channing punched his lever savagely, and once again the station was tortured by the effects of its own offensive.

Ship No. 3 suffered the same fate as No. 2.

Then, seconds later, armor-piercing shells began to hit Venus Equilateral. They hit, and because of the terrific charge, they began to arc at the noses. The terrible current passed through the fuses, and the shells exploded on contact instead of boring in before detonation. Metal was bent and burned, but only a few tiny holes resulted. As the charge on the station approached equilibrium once more, men ran with torches to seal these holes.

"Murdoch," said Channing, "I want you!"

"Come and get me!"

"Land—or die!" snapped Channing in a vicious tone. "I'm no humanitarian, Murdoch. You'd be better off dead!"

"Never!" said Hellion Murdoch.

Channing pulled the lever for the third time, but as he did, Murdoch's ship leaped forward under several G. The magnets could not change in field soon enough to compensate for this change in direction, and the charge failed to connect as a bull's eye. It did expend some of its energy on the tail of the ship. Not enough to cripple the Hippocrates, but the vessel took on a charge of enough value to make things hard on the crew.

Metal sparked, and instruments went mad. Meters wound their needles around the end pegs. The celestial globe glinted in a riot of color and then went completely dead. Gun servers dropped their projectiles as they became too heavily charged to handle, and they rolled across the turret floors, creating panic in the gun crews. The pilot fought the controls, but the charge on his driver tubes was sufficient to make his helm completely unpredictable. The panel sparked at him and seared his hands, spoiling his nervous control and making him heavy-handed.

"Murdoch," cried Channing in a hearty voice, "that was a miss! Want a hit?"

Murdoch's radio was completely dead. His ship was yawing from side to side as the static charges raced through the driver tubes. The pilot gained control after a fashion, and decided that he had taken enough. He circled the station warily and began to make a shaky landing at the south end.

Channing saw him coming, and with a glint in his eye, he pressed the lever for the fourth and last time.

Murdoch's ship touched the landing stage just after the charge had been driven out into space. The heavy negative charge on the Hippocrates met the heavy positive charge on Venus Equilateral. The ship touched, and from that contact, there arose a cloud of incandescent gas. The entire charge left the ship at once, and through that single contact. When the cloud dissipated, the contact was a crude but efficient welded joint that was gleaming white-hot.

Channing said to Walt: "That's going to be messy."

Inside of the Hippocrates, men were frozen to their handholds. It was messy, and cleaning up the Hippocrates was a job not relished by those who did it.

But cleaning up Venus Equilateral was no small matter, either.

A week went by before the snarled-up instruments were repaired. A week in which the captured Hippocrates was repaired, too, and used to transport prisoners to and material and special supplies from Terra, and Venus, and Mars. A week in which the service from planet to planet was erratic.

Then service was restored, and life settled down to a reasonable level. It was after this that Walt and Channing found time to spend an idle hour together. Walt raised his glass and said: "Here's to electrons!"

"Yeah," grinned Channing, "here's to electrons. Y'know, Walt, I was a little afraid that space might become a sort of Wild West show, with the ships bristling with space guns and betatrons and stuff like that. In which case you'd have been a stinking benefactor. But if the recoil is as bad as the output—and Newton said that it must be—I can't see ships cluttering up their insides with stuff that'll screw up their instruments and driver tubes. But the thing that amuses me about the whole thing is the total failure you produced."

"Failure?" asked Walt. "What failed?"

"Don't you know? Have you forgotten? Do you realize that spaceships are still ducking around meteors instead of blasting them out of the way with the Franks Electron Gun? Or did you lose sight of the fact that this dingbat started out in life as a meteor-sweeper?"

Walt glared over the rim of his glass, but he had nothing to say.