Ken had ground the precision mirror alone. He had ground his first one, a 4-inch glass, when he was a Boy Scout. Three years later he had tackled the tremendous job of producing a 12-inch one. Professor Douglas of the physics department at the college had pronounced it perfect. Ken opened the door and switched on the light inside the dome. "Don't mind the mess," he said. "I've been taking photographs of the comet for the last month." To Maria, who was used to the clutter of a laboratory, there was no mess. She admired the beauty of the instrument Ken and his friends had built. "Our university telescope isn't any better," she said. "You can't tell by the plumbing," Ken laughed. "Better take a look at the image before you pass judgment." Skilfully, he swung the long tube around to the direction of the comet. With the fine controls he centered the cross hairs of the eyepiece on the blazing object in the sky. "It's moving too fast to stay in range very long," he said. Maria stepped to the observer's position. She gasped suddenly at the image of the fiery monster hovering in the sky. Viewing the comet along the axis of the tail, as the Earth lay at the edge of it, an observer's vision was like that of a miniature, flaming sun with an offcenter halo of pulsing, golden light. To Maria, the comet seemed like something living. Slow, almost imperceptible ripples in the glowing scarves of light made them sway as if before some mighty, cosmic wind in space. "It's beautiful," Maria murmured, "but it's terrible, too. No wonder the ancients believed comets brought evil and death upon the Earth. I could almost believe it, myself!" Chapter 2. _Breakdown_ Ken Maddox could not remember a time when he had not wanted to become a scientist. Maybe it started when his father first invited him to look through a microscope. That was when he was a very small boy, but he could still remember the revelation of that experience. He remembered how it had seemed, on looking away from the lens, that the whole world of normal vision was only a fragment of that which was hidden behind curtains and shrouds and locked doors. Only men, like his father, with special instruments and wisdom and knowledge, could ever hope to understand the world of the unknown, which the ordinary person did not even suspect. Now, at sixteen, Ken was tall, with black hair that had an annoying curl to it. He was husky enough to be the main asset of the football squad of Mayfield High School in his senior year. He knew exactly where he was going and what he was going to do. He would be one of those men who lived beyond the mere surface of the world, and who would seek to understand its deep and hidden meanings. Ken thought of this as he watched Maria at the telescope. What a difference between knowing the comet as this instrument showed it, and with the knowledge revealed by modern astronomy, and knowing it as the average person in Mayfield did.