to wish that
we had started out at first to drift it back to Tellus in the _Hope_.
Let's see how much time we've got. We should start shooting one day
after an eclipse, so that we'll have five days to send. You see, we
don't want to point our beam too close to Jupiter or to any of the large
satellites, because the enemy might live there and might intercept it.
We had an eclipse yesterday--so one week from today, at sunrise, I
start shooting."

"But Earth's an evening star now; you can't see it in the morning."

"I'm not going to aim at Tellus. I'm shooting at Brandon, and he's never
there for more than a week or two at a stretch. They're prowling around
out in space somewhere almost all the time."

"Then how can you possibly hope to hit them?"

"It may be quite a job of hunting, but not as bad as you might think.
They probably aren't much, if any, outside the orbit of Mars, and
they usually stay within a couple of million kilometers or so of the
Ecliptic, so we'll start at the sun and shoot our beam in a spiral
to cover that field. We ought to be able to hit them inside of twelve
hours, but if we don't, we'll widen our spiral and keep on trying until
we do hit them."

"Heavens, Steve! Are you planning on telegraphing steadily for days at
a time?"

"Sure, but not by hand, of course--I'll have an automatic sender and
automatic pointers."

Stevens had at his command a very complete machine-shop, he had an ample
supply of power, and all that remained for him to do was to assemble the
parts which he had built during the long journey from Titan to Ganymede.
Therefore, at sunrise of the designated day, he was ready, and, with
Nadia hanging breathless over his shoulder, he closed the switch, a
toothed wheel engaged a delicate interrupter, and a light sounder began
its strident chatter.

"Ganymede point oh four seven ganymede point oh four seven ganymede
point oh four seven..." endlessly the message was poured out into the
ether, carried by a tight beam of ultra-vibrations and driven by forces
sufficient to propel it well beyond the opposite limits of the orbit
of Mars.

"What does it say? I can't read code."

Stevens translated the brief message, but Nadia remained unimpressed.

"But it doesn't say anything!" she protested. "It isn't addressed to
anybody, it isn't signed--it doesn't tell anybody anything about
anything."

"It's all there, ace. You see, since the beam is moving sidewise very
rapidly at that ran