Jan Lippershey's children played in his yard, and now and again, when he would let them, they played in the shop where he worked. They liked to play with the things he made. Lenses, convex and concave. The children played with the lenses, and the telescope was born. Now men could see farther. That happened in Holland, early in the 1600s. Perhaps it was more important than Thermopylae or Tours. Men looked at the stars. World on world on world--world without end--as far as the first telescope showed, the dance of the suns went on. Men made bigger lenses. Beyond those limits the suns were to be found. Did space go on forever? Bigger lenses, bigger lenses. But still men could not see into tomorrow. It was a formless void of unreality and no instrument could penetrate it. Men had to go blindly into tomorrow, fearing, hesitating, drawing back, until they were kicked there by relentless time. In 1940 men worked on a lens 200 inches in diameter. * * * * * In 1940, all through a sleepless night, Lee Garth watched his racing pencil write factor after factor, watched the equations grow from page to page. Still the pencil raced. He watched it. He did not think of Leonidas, who had withstood Xerxes, or of Charles Martel, or of Jan Lippershey, or any of the thousands of others who have warped the course of human destiny--Kepler, Newton, Watt, Einstein, Galileo, Copernicus, the little corporal who went down to Saint Helena. He did not even think of Lee Garth. For that night Lee Garth did not matter to himself. Nor ever again. The dawn came in through the windows of the old house where he worked. Softly, quietly, silently, the night went and the day came. Another tomorrow became today, another dark reality lifted out of the formless void of the future. * * * * * George McNeil, Scot production foreman in charge of the cable manufacturing department on United Electric's vast plant, stared at the order that had come down to him. His face a wrinkled frown, he studied the blue prints. "Those domned monkeys with their domned slip-sticks," he grunted, referring to the drafting department, "have made another mistake." Specification sheets in hands, he stalked out of his cubby-hole and headed for the office of the production manager. The production manager examined the specifications. He called the head of the drafting department on the office phone and got a short answer for his trouble. "The specifications are right," he said testily to McNeil. "Go ahead and fabricate them." "I can build the domned things," McNeil retorted. "But I'll sweat in hell if I see any use for them. Solid copper bus-bars twenty-four inches in diameter! We don't build a generator--and neither does anybody else in the world--that needs such cables to carry the current it produces."