“It was a steal, all right,” Tom agreed, but thinking with an inward chuckle that Chow had been the victim at any price!
“I could get you one jest like it, boss, next time I go by the store,” Chow offered generously.
84 MEGASCOPE SPACE PROBER
“Well-uh-no thanks.” Tom shook his head. “That would be a low-down trick, depriving you of the sole honor of sporting a knockout like that.”
“No call to feel thataway.” The cook took Tom’s explanation at face value. “
‘Tis kind o’ nice, though, wearin’ a w-nique number like this an’ watchin’ folks’
eyes pop. Gives you that well-dressed feelin’.”
“I’ll bet it does.” Tom’s eyes twinkled.
Chow’s face broke into a satisfied grin as he stomped off, crooning “Home on the Range” in his hoarse off-key baritone.
Tom smiled and went back to work. “I’ll concentrate on the scanning problem later,” he said to himself. “First I must figure out how to adjust a beam properly to the exact distance of the space object I want to see.”
But how? It seemed impossible to make the signal stop short after traveling a given distance. “I sure can’t chop off a radio beam as one would a length of link sausage,” Tom mused.
Chow’s visit reminded him of the spook fireworks episode in the galley. The fireworks had occurred at the nodal points of the radio waves. Tom’s prober beam would naturally have to terminate at the nodal point of the wave, too.
Or would it?
“Of course not!” Tom realized excitedly. “I can stop the beam at any point, simply by can-A SUDDEN WARNING 85
celing it out with another signal 180 degrees out of phase.”
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