“Another thing, whilst I hold it in my mind,” said Channing, thoughtfully. “You go flinging electrons off the station in basketful after basketful, and the next bird that drops a ship on the landing stage is going to spot-weld himself right to the south end of Venus Equilateral. It wouldn’t be long before the station would find itself being pulled into Sol because of the electrostatic stress—if we didn’t run out of electrons first!”
“I hardly think that we’d run out—but we might have a tough time flinging them away after a bit. Could it be that we should blow out a fist full of protons at the same time?”
“Might make up a concentric beam and wave positive ions at the target,” said Channing. “Might help.”
“But this space-charge effect. How do we get around that?”
“Same way we make the el
