"Twenty cents a ton."
"I'll haul it for two."
"You can't," objected the manager. "The Trans-Saturnian Lighter Service's charter says—"
"I know what it says," snapped back Kellog. "My father drew it up. It confers a perpetual monopoly on all intersatellite ship-borne commerce. Now listen. Clear a place about twenty feet square and arrange to dump ore in it from twenty feet or more above. Mark it off with safety lines and don't ever let a man step across the lines. Then watch my smoke."
He cut the connection long enough to send similar instructions to the receiving station by the smelter. Then he watched through the antichron while the preparations were being made at both ends of the line. When they were ready he turned the machine over to Wade.
Wade sat down and got to work. His job was very much like that of the operator of a grab bucket. He kept his eyes on the visual screen, his hands on the controls of the cubical one.
Current!—the empty cube appears on Mimas—an avalanche of ore fills it—shift current—it disappears from Mimas, appears at the smelter on Titan—the unloading cradle on which it materializes tips and dumps the ore—when it is upright again, shift current. Mimas, fill; Titan, dump. Mimas, fill; Titan, dump. That was all there was to it. Hundreds of tons a minute, delivered in Titan the day it is mined.
"That shoots Interplanetary Transportation and Trans-Saturnian all to hell, I should say," drawled the editor of the Herald, who had been invited to watch the demonstration. He was conducting a campaign to have Carmichael's injunction revoked. Now that the people knew cheap power was available, they were angry about it. "Yes," continued the editor, "they're sunk. I'm going to stroll down to the bank and draw out my balance before the run starts."
"What do you mean?" asked Kellog.
"Plenty. The bank is really a sort of holding company for Wolf. Now that his companies are all shot, it'll crash. You may not know it yet, but Carmichael is ruined. He will be a very sick wolf in an hour or so."