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I told you I had a hunch, and Alcantro and Fedanzo worked out the right answer for me. If I can cut it, Quince, and if their screens go down for a minute, shoot your visiray into them and see what you can see." "All x. How much power are you going to draw?" "Plenty it figures a little better than four hundred thousand kilofranks.
"Output eighty-five thousand kilofranks," replied MacDonald, the first assistant. "Intake forty-nine thousand." "Not so good can't hold out forever at that rate. Shove out the receptor screens to the limit and drive 'em. They figure a top of sixty thousand, but we ought to pick up a little extra from that blaze out there. Drive 'em full out or up to sixty-five, whichever comes first.
To that end they had arranged their circuits to hurl seven hundred sixty-five thousand kilofranks the entire power of their massed accumulators and their highest possible cosmic intake in one tiny bar of superlative density, less than one meter in diameter!
That's what the checkerwork and fins are for so that it can absorb the maximum amount of heat from the current of hot, moist air I spoke about. It's a sweet system we'll have to rig up one between Tellus and the moon. Or even between the Equator and the Arctic Circle there'd be enough thermal differential to give us a million kilofranks.
Instantly released, the full seven hundred thousand kilofranks of their stupendous batteries of accumulators drove into the middle frequency of the attacking band, and Brandon's heart was in his mouth as he stared into the plate to see what would happen. He saw!
"Do you know what you are doing?" asked Westfall, after a few minutes' thought. "I believe that you are charging their accumulators at the rate of," he glanced at a meter, "exactly thirty-one thousand five hundred kilofranks." "Great Cat!" Brandon's hand flashed to a switch and the beam expired. "But they can't just simply grab it and store it, Quince it's impossible!"
They apparently know nothing of the possibilities of cosmic radiation, but depend upon tight-beam transmission from their own power-plants which transmission they have perfected to a point far beyond anything reached by us of the three planets. They do not use accumulators, and therefore their dissipation is limited to their maximum reception, which is about seventy thousand kilofranks.
LIFT!" He touched a button and a set of plunger switches drove home, releasing into the forty-five enormous driving projectors the equilibrium power the fifteen-thousand-and-odd kilofranks of energy that exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity upon the mass of the cruiser.
"For cat's sake, Quince, let's get busy! They're outside somewhere, since the police have scoured every cubic kilometer within range of the power plants without finding a trace of them. We've got the power question licked right now with these fields we can draw sixty thousand kilofranks from cosmic radiation, which is lots more than we'll ever need.
"It works, all x, to the queen's taste," as he donned his heavy ray-goggles and resumed his place. After making certain that the visiray was precisely synchronized and phased with the searching frequency, he built up the power of that beam until it was using twenty thousand kilofranks.
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