"I wish you'd go over and tell them what's wrong. Kane, the publisher came in for the unveiling of the thing, and we'd hate to present him with a complete failure, in spite of its uselessness." "Kane's here? Good, I'll go right over." Maynard was youthful enough to be amazed that the weight of his rank opened a path through the grouped technicians to the complex instrument that lined the entire wall of the huge laboratory. Kane was near the center, and the only one in the group that knew Guy Maynard well enough to call him by his first name: therefore he was the first to speak. "You invented this thing, Guy. Can you make it work?" Guy blushed. "I didn't invent it--" he started and then saw Kane's puzzled look, which caused him to pause; then he nodded and finished: "--I merely worked on it theoretically. I did not have enough equipment in the lifeship to build any more than a few of the more complex circuits." "Good enough," laughed Kane. "Well you may know more than we do at that. After all," he said in defense of his statement, "these men have been working on it for a couple of years." A man with the rayed stars of a senior executive offered: "That's not strictly true, Mr. Kane. We started to work on it about three days ago--if you consider the instrument as a whole. There have been many groups working on the components separately, building them up. We assembled the whole last week." "Take a swing at it, Guy." "It's a maze to me," admitted Guy. "Let me see the circuits." * * * * * It took Maynard some time to figure them out. He was working from memory now, and it was none too good, plus the fact that he had memorized the complex circuit in Ertinian symbols and in Ertinian constants, and they all required conversion to Terran terms. He called for the group leaders of the various components, and asked them to report on the functions of their parts. Together, they pinned the error down, and corrected it. Then Maynard turned the thing on himself. The broad plate took on a gray-green background, mottled with huge circular blotches of white. He turned the focusing knob, and the mottling contracted into individual circles of intense, flaming white. He reduced the intensity control, and the eye-searing brightness dimmed to a more comfortable level. More fiddling with the focus, with alternate adjustment of the intensity, for they were inter-reacting, and the plate took on the appearance of the sky. "So far so good. Now for the shaping control," said Maynard. He drove the left hand end swirling upward on the plate with one knob, stretched the stars across the top of the plate, and compressed them along the right side. He caused them to whirl circularly, and gradually the distortion dropped until the constellations appeared. "There you are," he told the chief technician. "Fine. Now what can we do?"