Paul was handicapped. The spotter was not available. Lacking the spotter to use as a point of aim, Paul was forced to choose the aiming telescope in the dome instead of the more precise cross-hairs on the optical-glass. This added to the error, and to add once more to that error was the fact that spacecraft in flight tend to revolve along their driving axis so that the angle between the true line of flight and the aiming point changed in angle. Paul would have to use Alpha Centauri itself as a point-of-aim. The correction-angle was supplied by the observatory, and applied to the aiming telescope in the dome. A lot of minute errors that added up to a gross at the end of flight. Basically, the job of the galactic survey would remove one of the errors: That of the crude measurement of distance between the stars themselves. Paul was a good pilot. He cut the aiming-star close and watched it in the 'scope until it disappeared. He was now in that blackness that surrounded every ship during the faster-than-light speed. He was on his way. Nothing to do for two weeks but wait for the course to end. Nothing to do but to sit and think, and plan, and dream. To think of Haedaecker and the Z-wave; to plan for the future when his discoveries brought him fame and fortune; to dream of Nora Phillips. Paul began to hum, and after a moment or two the humming broke out into a full-throated, but dubious baritone: "_Round and round and round go the deuterons Round and round the magnet swings 'em Round and round and round go the deuterons SMACK! in the target go the microamps!_" CHAPTER 6 Buried in the loose, powdery dust that covered Proxima Centauri I, a spacecraft lay concealed. Ten miles across the blazing flatlands of dust, Galactic Survey Station I was clearly visible. From the station the spacecraft blended so well with the dust that it could not be seen. Only a sharp observer who knew where to look and what to look for could have seen the turret of the spacecraft lofting above the dusty plains. The long-barrelled machine rifle would have been invisible to the sharpest of eye. Several miles to the other side of the Survey Station there were a group of furrows kicked-up in the plain where test-bursts from the machine rifle had landed. A television detector was set upon the area between the concrete landing deck and the main spacelock of the Survey Station so that any erect, moving object that intersected the detector-line would cause the machine rifle to fire so that its projectiles would pass through the moving object. The man in the hidden spacecraft had been playing solitaire for day upon day; the record of his score on the wall of the ship was long--and not too honest. Eventually the detector-alarm rang and he dropped his cards. He ran to shut off all of the detecting equipment because detecting equipment itself could be in turn detected and he wanted no reprisals. He set his eye to the telescope and watched the new arrival.