"Hadley, how much coating have we got on those cathodes?"
"Not too much. We had about twenty G-hours to begin with. We went to a half-G for about twenty hours, and now we're running on a quarter-G, which would leave us go for forty hours more. That's a grand total of about sixty hours."
"And the batteries?"
"In pretty good shape."
"Well, look. If it should come to a choice between floor and signal gun, we'll choose the gun. We've about twelve hours left in the cathodes, and since everybody is now used to quarter-G we might even slide it down to an eighth-G, which would give us about twenty-four hours."
"Your gun is still putting out?"
"So far as I can tell. Ten hours from now, we should know, I think, predicating my guess on whatever meager information they must have."
"We could save some juice by killing most of the lights in the ship."
"That's a thought. Johannson, have one of your men run around and remove all lights that aren't absolutely necessary. He can kill about three quarters of them, I'm certain. That'll save us a few kilowatt hours," said Channing. "And another thing. I'm about to drop the power of our electron gun and run it continuously. If the boys are anywhere in the neighborhood, they'll be needing the continuous disturbance for direction finding. I'd say in another five hours that we should start continuous radiation."
"You know, Channing, if this thing works out all right, it will be a definite vote for pure, deductive reasoning."