Excerpt.....Mark Kingman was beginning to feel the brunt of Channing's statement to the effect that legal-minded men were of little importance when it came to the technical life in space, where men's lives and livelihood depended more on technical skill than upon the legal pattern set for their protection in the complex society of planetary civilization.
It seemed that way. For instead of gaining their ends by legal restrictions on the power-transmission tube investigations, Terran Electric had lost their chance. Venus Equilateral had the legal right to tinker with the transmission tubes all they wanted to, and in return, Terran Electric held all of the planetary rights to Venus Equilateral's solar beam—which in the domain covered by natural celestial bodies was about as valuable as the gold-mining rights to the crater Tycho.....
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