“I’ve been mapping out how to get the exact range on whatever I’m looking at,” Tom reported.
“Give me a fill-in,” Bud begged. As always, he was keen to follow the progress of his friend’s latest invention.
Tom explained his wave-terminal technique, but Bud found it hard to grasp from words alone. So Tom went to the blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk.
“Suppose we want to see the moon close up,” he began. “We beam out two signals at the same instant-but with a tiny difference in wave length.”
Tom wrote down his example. “One signal would have a wave length of say, 100 meters, the other of 100.0001 meters.” He did some hasty arithmetic.
“As you can see, the waves will become more and more out of phase as they travel along
A SUDDEN WARNING 87
through space. By the time they reach the moon, they’ll be exactly 180
degrees out of phase-which means they cancel each other out. And this gives us our terminal point for scanning the moon’s surface.”
Bud blinked. “I get it-but boy, imagine on-the-spot television, anywhere in the universe!”
“Let’s not get too ambitious,” Tom cautioned with a grin. “How’re things at Astro-Dynamics?”
“Okay on the Venus probe,” Bud reported. Then, looking serious, he added, “But wait’ll I tell you the latest. I didn’t want to discuss it over the phone in case someone was eavesdropping on the line.
“The Astro-Dynamics Corporation,” Bud went on, “has just arranged for its engineers to attend a demonstration of a revolutionary new type of radio. It was developed by a Swedish company, R. Selland, Inc. Their American agent, a Jules Furster, has approached Astro-Dynamics about the radio.
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