The Ultimate Weapon

She was about thirty million miles off Pluto, just beginning to get in touch with some of the larger mining stations out there, when Buck Kendalls turn at the controls came along. ...As soon as she got within ten million miles of the little tender, she began getting Coles signals, and within twelve hours had reached the tiny thing, located it, and picked it up. ...If you invented a neutron gun which could kill through tungsten walls without injuring anything within, a system of accelerating a ship that didnt affect the inhabitants of that ship, and a means of exceeding the speed of light, all within a few months of each other, would you become a pirate? ... If I didnt have a cent before, Id have relief from work by selling it for a few hundred millions-and Id sell it mighty easily too, for an invention like that is worth an incalculable sum. ...If your trip was, say, twenty billions of miles to the next planet, you'd be fighting a gravity as bad as the solar gravity at Earth here all the way-no decline with a little distance like that.