Explore "Spacehounds of IPC" by E.E. Smith on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"Must you go back to Ganymede? " Barkovis asked, slowly and thoughtfully. He was sitting upon a crystal bench beside the fountain, talking with Stevens, who, dressed in his bulging space-suit, stood near an airlock of the _Forlorn Hope_. "It seems a shame that you should face again those unknown, monstrous creatures who so inexcusably attacked us both without provocation."
"I'm not so keen on it myself, but I can't see any other way out of it," the Terrestrial replied. "We left a lot of our equipment there, you know; and even if I should build duplicates here, it wouldn't do us any good. These ten-nineteens are the most powerful transmitting tubes known when we left Tellus, but even their fields, dense as they are, can't hold an ultra-beam together much farther than about six astronomical units. So you see we can't possibly reach our friends from here with this tube; and your system of beam transmission won't hold anything together even that far, and won't work on any wave shorter than Roeser's Rays. We may run into some more of those little spheres, though, and I don't like the prospect. I wonder if we couldn't plate a layer of that mirror of yours upon the _Hope_ and carry along a few of those bombs? By the way, what is that explosive -- or is it something beyond Tellurian chemistry?"