The men looked on in awe. They had seen the mad splendor of the spiraling gas streams hurled forth from binaries like Beta Lyrae; they had driven through the hearts of globular clusters, with giant suns by the myriad on every hand; but somehow the lonely, majestic grandeur of this object was more impressive. A star--too distant to show a perceptible disk--too bright to be gazed at directly, putting to shame the surrounding celestial objects. Even the moon, sliding out of the shadow in an apologetic fashion, no longer seemed bright. Arthur Dennis was the first to speak. "It gets you, doesn't it? I suppose it's a companion to the sun, or else--" "Or _else_," said Leo flatly, snatching the spectroscope. The great star was white, with just a suspicion of topaz in its glow, and Leo was prone to jump to conclusions. One glance through the instrument, sweeping it slightly from left to right, was enough. He grinned, removed the eye lens, and replaced the paper screen of the original arrangement, and three heads bent once more to look at the streak of color. It wasn't a streak this time. A single bright point centered itself directly behind the objective lens, and to either side of this there extended a broken series of dashes--the intense emission bands, bordered on the violet side by relatively sharp dark lines, which characterize what the early astronomers called a "P Cygni" star. The continuous background spectrum was too faint to show; the grating was so coarse that several orders of the spectrum fell on the paper at once. "And that's your beacon!" remarked Little after a few moments of silence. "Well, it certainly earns the name." "You can get our location now?" asked Arthur. "I should think you wouldn't need to say much but 'Near S Doradus,' from the looks of that thing." "Wrong, blast it," answered Leo. "When I said I could judge brightness to a tenth of a magnitude, I was thinking of decent stars with visual mags between zero and plus six. For this thing, I don't know whether it's minus five or minus fifteen--whether the blasted thing is three quarters of a parsec or eighty parsecs away. I'll get the direction, though, and maybe I'll find a way to measure the brightness. I'll look after that; you people worry about what to do with it if I get it. Good night." The dismissal was rather pointed, and Leo turned his full attention to the pad on which he was computing, so Little and Arthur silently retired. So did all but one of the guards who had been watching, invisible in the shadow of the superstructure. * * * * * Dr. Little opened his eyes with a start and realized it was full daylight. It had been the first sleep under normal gravity in several weeks, and his body had made the most of it. The other two sleeping bags were empty, but the Dennis brothers were both present. They were by the window, removing a piece of canvas that had apparently been draped across it. Little sat up.