Yet Carroll felt the full impact of helpless frustration. He was pitted against an alien culture capable of scientific marvels such as the teleport and interstellar travel and other things. They were capable of destroying the solar system while the only man who stood against them was incapable even of discovering how they intended to do it. He threw himself into his work and the days sped past as he built and experimented and planned--and all too occasionally failed. When his cohorts came to him with the announcement that the first sixty-foot paraboloid of revolution was to be initiated that day at the Lunar Observatory Carroll merely nodded and returned to his work. He cared not at all that the new observatory was to be called the Carroll Observatory in honor of the man who made possible the perfect reflector. At that time, Carroll was busy with his invisible fields of force and spacial planes of stress and did not want to be bothered with trivia--especially trivia that he had really had no hand in inventing. A lot of good the Carroll Observatory would be to mankind if the Solar System were destroyed! * * * * * Majors entered Dr. Pollard's office with a large glossy photograph in one hand. Pollard looked up amusedly as Majors said, "I'm getting psycho, I guess." "Yes? And what makes you think so?" Majors laughed. "Because every time I get a problem I seem to come to you instead of going where it can be answered by theoreticians and physicists." Pollard smiled. "I think you come here because this is one place where you can hold your own with another man who can hold his own with you," he observed. "Well," admitted Majors, "you don't understand theoretical physics as well as I do and psychology is over my head. Anyway, what do you make of this?" The photograph was of a patch of sky. Pollard shook his head. "Is this a test question?" he asked. "Remember, I'm the psychiatrist and I'm supposed to hand the patient strange items and ask them what they see in them." Majors laughed. "This is a section of Boötes." "Boötees," murmured Pollard irrelevantly, "are knitted gadgets you put on babies' feet." "All right, I'll leave quietly," chuckled Majors. "Seriously, though, look at this." He pointed out a tiny smudge among the myriad of stars. "Well?" asked the doctor. "It shouldn't be." "Maybe a flaw?" "Nope," objected Majors. "It persists through twenty-seven photographs made one minute apart--each exposed for one minute." "Um. What is it?" "Don't know," replied Majors. "But it is darned interesting." "Boötes is the region from whence comes the Lawson Radiation, isn't it?" Majors nodded. "That's why they sent it to me. It was taken by the Carroll Telescope on Luna, a sort of tribute to Carroll that the first photographs and work done by his invention be directed at that portion of the sky he worked so long on--to his own downfall." "Tell me, Majors, do you often get these kind of smudges?"