McBride muttered: "Power generating equipment is running O.K."
"Yeah," agreed Hammond. "Everything's on the beam from the explosion chamber to the inverted alphatron. We've got plenty of potential power handy. Larry, zoop in close and check the power equipment on a pure, resistive load."
"You mean shut off the drive and coast through the zero region with no drive and with the gravitron running at full output on resistance load?"
"Right. This fishy smell has a rare odor. I think we're on the trail of it."
"O.K., Steve. Can you wait about three minutes? The first encirclement of Telfu will be over then and we'll have our first experimental curve."
"We'll wait."
The sigma curve was completed, and Larry circled far out and made a fast run toward the planet, in a course similar to the one they used on their first try.
Meanwhile, Hammond looked at the curve and grinned.
McBride looked over his shoulder and grinned, too.
Hammond slapped the curve down on a drawing board and began to plot efficiency against a polar co-ordinate. The curve was roughly circular, but exhibited a tendency towards a cardioid. McBride played with the figures for a minute, and as he opened his mouth to say something, theHaywire Queengave that sickening lurch and changed abruptly from super drive to the emergencies.
"Darn!" said McBride. "This everlasting acceleration changing business is going to make a nervous wreck of me yet."
"Also physical if it is taken in too large doses," grinned Steve. "The human anatomy can accept velocity without limit—well, up to the point where the ultimate velocity is reached. We've gone a goodly hunk of stuff over the speed of light."
"That's questionable."
"We came over from Terra in a lot less time than light. That'll be arriving nine years from now."
"Uh-huh. But don't forget we wrapped ourselves in a space-warp and ran the space-warp. I think that we can safely assume that the warp is another space and that we were not traveling better than the speed of light with respect to our own space."
"Whoof! What a theory! Drag that one past again, slow enough so I can climb aboard."
"You got it," laughed McBride. "And if it smells, you fling out a better one for us to shoot holes in."
"O.K. But to get back to velocity, the human anatomy can stand velocity without limit. Period. Argue if you like, Mac, but that's my statement. No one has ever been able to prove that velocity alone is harmful to man, beast, bird, or fish!"
"I'm as silent as the tomb."
"Acceleration can be adapted to—in meagre doses. A man can stand up under 4-G. On his tummy, lying down, 8- or 9-G isn't too hard on him. Dunk him up to the breathing-vents in a good grade of oxidized hydrogen and 15-G is possible without too much harm."
"Yes. O Learned Scholar."
"But, students," said Hammond standing up and taking a bow. He was interrupted by the resumption of the super drive which, being set at ninety feet per second per second apparent instead of eleven feet, caught him off balance and almost dropped him on the end of his nose.
"What I was saying," laughed McBride, "was the effect that rates of change of acceleration have upon the anatomy."
"As I demonstrated," grinned Hammond from the floor, "it is changes in acceleration that cause havoc. It causes jerks—"
"To sit on the floor," chuckled McBride. "Get up. Stop playing on the floor, Steve, and take a squint at this curve. Plotting an exponential factor for the ordinates of the graph, using Telfu for the center, we find a locus of equal power-soak-up out here—which I estimate to be a little more than two hundred thousand miles!"
"Ah, the wonders of analyst," said Hammond. "With a defunct drive and a wild idea, Jawn McBride hauls a satellite out of the sky and plants it—Here!"
"What do you think?"
"Who am I to argue with people who understand the mysteries of A to the Xth power equals zero, divided by the date of the month times the ace of spades, equals eleven o'clock. All joking aside, Mac, it looks right to my uninitiated mind."
"Does, hey?"
"Sure. That means that said moonlet—I say moonlet because our pix show that Telfu hasn't anything worthy of the name of a full, honest moon—must be high in cupralum."
"Sort of hard to believe."
"Yeah, but not impossible. It's quite believable that the right alloys should be foundau naturel, so to speak. There's nothing tricky about cupralum. Mix it together and smelt it down—voila!—cupralum. A totally useless and good-for-nothing alloy prior to the discovery of the gravitic spectrum."
"Must be fairly large," suggested Timkins.
"Sure—according to man-made standards. Celestially, it might be a mere scrap of dirt. A sub-sub-sub-microscopic bit of cosmic dust less than a hundred miles in diameter."
"Ugh," grunted Larry. "You make man and his works sort of insignificant."
"We are. Do the planets care what we do on their miles-thick hides? Do the suns care that we wonder at them? Does the cosmos give a rap that we chase from planet to planet and from sun to sun?"
"You make it sound as though they are capable of thinking."
"If they did, we wouldn't know about it; and they wouldn't know we existed. Proportionally, man is smaller than the filterable virus. So we have a slab of cupralum, which is—according to Mac—Here! That's fine. It blankets Telfu like a complete shroud, as far as the good old gravitics go."
Larry Timkins looked up from a page of scrawled equations. "A slab of cupralum a hundred miles in diameter, rotating in the mechanogravitic field thrown out by Sirius would certainly soak up every bit of power. Must be a slick tie-in. The gravitron puts our O.K. on a resistive load. Hooked to the drive, everything goesphhht."
"Sure. That's part of the trouble. It's the drive, coupled with the general gravitic interference cut up by Soaky."
"Soaky?"
"I have hung a name on the satellite. Heretofore it has been nameless. We have named itSoaky."
"There is a slight discrepancy between this cardioid and the calculated curve," said McBride. "Obviously, the cusp would be on a line between Telfu and Soaky, projected from the satellite through the planet to the far side. We orbited around the planet and were closer to Soaky on the side he was on—"
"Is that syllogistic reasoning?" asked Hammond. "Or sheer conjecture? How about shadow?"
"This is quite a wide effect."
"Any shading of Soaky's sphere of influence would tend to deepen the cusp like that. That cardioid is such a curve; there's no reason to doubt that Telfu would tend to shade the field."
"Larry. Can you calculate the field absorption of a standard model planet with the above figures?"
"The attenuation?"
"Yes."
"Sure. It'd help if I knew the chemical components, mass, physical constants, electrical properties, gravitic properties, and nuclear emanations. How close do you want it?"
"Plus or minus twenty percent."
"I can give that to you without calculating," said Timkins. "Telfu is similar to Terra within twenty percent. Terra's attenuation amounts to twenty-nine percent; in other words, the attenuation due to the presence of Terra in the light-line between source and measuring device is twenty-nine percent greater than it would be if Terra were not there and the spacial attenuation only cut the strength."
"Thirty percent, roughly, because it's easier to figure," said McBride. He made calculations, set them down linearly as to the magnitudes, and then transferred the vectors to the curve.
"That's one large bit closer," he said. "We'll better that, some day. But for now, playmates, I've had my Idea-for-the-Week. Let's cut us another caper around Telfu at right angles to this curve. One side will pass the peak and the opposite side will cut the cusp. Same distance, same speed, same everything. Follow?"
"At some distance."
"I believe that we will find a place where the cusp really comes down closer to Telfu," said McBride. "How much drive inefficiency can we tolerate and still lift?"
"From Telfu? Not enough to keep the breakers from blowing. And don't say wire 'em shut. They're right on the ragged edge now, on account of we know what we're doing and do not want to blow circuit breakers during experiments unless they are really in trouble. But the gravitron-cupralum driving equipment is not our only ace in the bucket. The emergency batteries, though inefficient, can still put us down and get us off. Providing, of course, that your map there gives us a chance."
"Not knowing the orbital constants of Soaky; the plane of Soaky's ecliptic: the rotational features of Telfu, we are taking chances. One rotation of Telfu might be plenty safe if we hit it on the nose. Two might put us out here and then we'd have to go through seven years of astronomical investigations before we found the place where that cusp came in again—and we'd probably have to wait anything from sixteen to nine thousand years before Soaky passed overhead again. The latter might get boring. But we can take a chance on one day, plus whatever angular movement Soaky makes with Telfu as center."
"Think Soaky's ecliptic is fairly close to Telfu's equator?"
"Within twenty or thirty degrees. I'm assuming the old theory of the Planitesimal Hypothesis. Sling out your molten stuff, let it condense, and you'll find everything rotating in the same direction in about the same plane. Might be clockwise or counter-clockwise, but only one way per solar system. One moon in all of the junk that goes around Sol is contrariwise—and they think that was a captured wanderer. The greatest obliquity is somewhere near forty degrees, most of the large planets being less than ten, I think."
"Celestially, I believe it may be impossible for a satellite to hold an orbit whose plane is vertical to the planet's orbit. I've never given it any thought, but it sounds dangerous to the satellite. Also, Sirius' tidal drag would tend to bring all the planets' axes into vertical line, too."
"Oh the devil. I want to land. If waiting overnight is dangerous, we'll slide in there and out again inside of an hour. But, darn it, I want to plant my number eleven EE's on that planet. Anyone agree?"
"Anyone who doesn't like the idea may get out and walk," said Hammond. "Hold your hat, fellows. Here we go again—"
Sandra Drake reached out of her luxurious bed and pulled a cord. She did it in a languorous move, like a lithe and lazy cat. She did it with a sort of God-given right to do so, and her expression was one of deep self-delight. Whatever she got from Telfu, they owed to Sandra Drake—
Her second pull on the call-cord was more of an impertinent yank. Her self-delight changed to exasperation that they should keep her waiting. Yet she would forgive them, for they were ignorant, in forgiving them her grace would be more evident. They would love her the more for forgiving them their sins of omission—
Sandra's third pull caused the collapse of the call-bell box, and the cord fell, landing in long, graceful loops over her outstretched arm.
Sandra rolled out of bed and threw the cord across the room, where it draped itself about the throat of a marble nude of a Telfan woman. It could not have been placed there with more delicacy; adding just the right touch of decoration to the nude. The center of the cord depended across the chest of the statue in a graceful loop, the bottom of which crossed just above the upper pair of breasts. The ends of the cord passed once more about the throat in opposite directions, and the ends crossed the looped center to dangle between the lower breasts.
The decorative touch did not strike a responsive chord in Sandra Drake. She wanted rip-roaring action, not interior decoration. So she stamped over and jerked the cord from the statue and tried to rend it in her hands. She was not strong enough to do the cord any damage but she did succeed in breaking a one-inch fingernail.
She stormed and stamped, and said a few things that are better mentioned in the abstract, including references to the statue's maker and his family for several generations coming and going. To Sandra's Terran-minded ideas of beauty, the statue was an abomination in spite of its perfection of workmanship. It was not merely un-Terran and therefore strange, it was almost-but-not-quite human, and therefore downright repulsive, and Sandra said so in unladylike language. That the same reactions, in reverse, applied in the Telfan-Sandra relationship was not yet clear to her. Her language sounded more adapted to caisson workers, space-ship builders, or mule skinners than it did the luxury of her present abode.
Then at long and exasperating last, the door opened gingerly and a serving woman entered.
"Well!" exploded Sandra. "Where have you been?"
The woman said something clear and articulate, which meant she was very sorry but which meant nothing to Drake. That made Drake boil merrily.
"Can't you speak Terran?" stormed Sandra.
The woman came into the room, followed by another.
"Who are you?" shouted Sandra. "Where's that other one—I can hardly tell you apart."
The first Telfan woman turned to her friend and said: "She's throwing another fit."
"She wants the Lady Thani. Thani is the only one who can speak much of her language."
"If I were Thani, I'd slip a thumb into each eye and pry."
"I wouldn't waste my time on that," returned the second woman. "I'd just make away with her and forget about it. I wouldn't care to have my sleep disturbed by blood, screams, and torture."
Sandra huffed up tall. "Will you two creatures stop gabbling at one another and get me Thani. Where is that creature?"
"Yes, she wants Thani. I heard her mention her name."
"If Thani isn't here, get me Tet'h. Or Gormal. Or Elyon."
"How can we tell her that Thani, Tet'h, Gormal, and Elyon went to meet the other Terrans?"
Sandra heard the names and the wordTerrans. "Did they run off and leave me here?" she yelled.
They shook their heads.
"Go ... yes?" asked Sandra.
"Go ... yes!" answered Delya.
"I want to go, too."
"I ... go ... no," said Delya.
"Not you, me."
"You ... no?"
"Me ... yes."
"Me ... yes!" agreed Delya.
Sandra put both palms against her cheeks and gave vent to a yell of sheer frustration. Then she calmed once more. "Did every one of you that knows a word of Terran go?"
"Tonla, I think she's asking about Thani and the rest."
"But how can we tell her?"
"Do we want to? If all are like her—this Terra must be a bad, bad place indeed. And she is but a female. What must the males be?"
At this point it must be recorded that the first Interstellar incident was averted by Sandra Drake's refusal to work in learning the Telfan language. Drake's possible actions if she had been able to understand Delya's remark might have led to the First Interplanetary War. Amicable relations resulted from Sandra Drake's ignorance.
"After all," said Tonla, "they went because there isn't much of her language between all of them. All together they may be able to converse with the Terrans."
"And Elyon says that she is quite uninformed as to the technicalities of this device which will not work on Telfu. She inferred that these others know much about it. They are the ones to contact if Telfu is to gain. Why shouldn't they all go?"
"Had I the right, I'd have sent them," said Tonla. "We'd better get out of here before this woman gets violent. I think she's about to start throwing things."
"She should throw a fit," sneered Delya. "Only the very beautiful can behave in that arrogant manner."
"Or the very rich."
"Name it the very desirable. Thani is very desirable, and yet she does not raise hob with Tet'h. And Thani is not only beautiful, but she is wealthy, too."
"And Tet'h is not without his own desirability," smiled Tonla. "Nor his wealth. Beauty walks in the arms of grace. She has neither."
"Let's get out. And let us hope that all Terrans are not as nasty as this one."
"I fear, though. If I were a Terran, I'd never have come to get her," said Tonla. "Unless she and they are well met."
"Perhaps they are afraid of the bad impression she'll make if they leave her here."
"You hope for that?"
"No race could be that bad."
Sandra mustered enough coherency to ask another question. "How can I get to my friends?"
Much negation.
"Can't anyone understand me?"
More gestures of complete misunderstanding.
"Get out!" yelled Sandra, and then as they started to leave, Sandra exploded again. The slamming of the door coincided with the first eruption, but the molten lava and hot ashes fell on an empty room.
"If she'd bothered to learn one word of Telfan, they'd have taken her," said Delya. "But they couldn't weigh down that little flier with one more—especially one who could be of no use to them. They'll return for her later."
"Too bad we can't put postage on her and mail her back to this Terra of hers."
"She'd come back stamped: 'Mail not wanted!'"
Sandra swore a few blood-curdlers and won her point by making an impression on the marble statue with the hard, sharp corner of a heavy metal box that stood on the table beside her bed. Then she ripped out of her pajamas and dressed quickly. She ran from her room and confronted the first man she met.
"Where are they?" she snapped.
He shook his head and pointed down the hall.
Drake followed the pointing finger to a large room. She stamped in, obviously interrupting some sort of governmental meeting.
"I want to go to my friends," she said imperiously.
The man at the head of the table shook his head sadly.
"I must go to them! Or," she asked superciliously, "are they coming here?"
More shaking of the patriarchal head.
"Can't you understand, either?" she stormed.
A shrug of the shoulder and a shake of the head gave Sandra to understand that she was speaking in an alien language to them.
"Crano!" she snapped. She didn't know its meaning, but it was the only Telfan word she knew, and she did know that it was a term signifying that the receiver of the epithet was slightly less than educated.
The elderly man went white. Two of the younger men arose, came forward, took Sandra Drake by the arms—one to each—and removed her from the chamber. They were not gentle, and on any inhabited planet employing the use of the Terran vernacular, she had been "Bounced!"
And Sandra knew it.
And then there came a bit of understanding. It hit hard. And in the brief minutes that Sandra looked facts in the face before she took to demanding impossible things once more, she realized that she had backed into her own trap. She had been demanding. She had chosen to teach those who met her the Terran language instead of learning Telfan. Now those who understood any bit of Terran had gone to meet theHaywire Queen, leaving her among those who could not understand her at all. She could not communicate her desires to any of them.
She could not even tell them of the desire that they wanted to hear: That she wanted to leave.
The whole city would have broken a blood vessel to get her out.
But they didn't talk the same language.
TheHaywire Queencame down in a screaming, wild landing. She rifled down out of the sky, careening. She slanted for a half mile, and then squared away and came plummeting down vertically. Inside, the accelerometer was making wild gyrations as Timkins fought the controls.
The whistling of the big ship's passage through the air slid down the audible scale as the velocity dropped. The ship slowed, and came to a perfect landing—
Twelve feet above the surface!
Like a slug of lead, theHaywire Queenpoised for the barest instant, and then dropped the intervening distance. The landing plates sank into the soft soil of Telfu for several feet and the plates groaned, a rivet or two squeaked, and some welded joints disagreed. But spaceships are rigid structures, made for hard usage and considerable stresses and strains. It weathered the hard landing, though the angle was slightly cocked due to the unevenness of the turf's hardness. TheHaywire Queenwas still space-worthy.
"Rotten pilot," muttered Hammond.
"Terrible," agreed McBride.
"Look, you two grinning apes. I missed Telfu by exactly one hundred and forty-four inches. Twelve feet in 2,630,000,000,000,000,000 feet. Well within the experimental error, I think."
"Twelve feet in nine light-years isn't bad," said McBride. "Some day, Larry, you can bend that mathematical mechanism you use instead of a brain into calculating whether the landing effect would have been worse atplustwelve feet instead of minus."
"A mere matter of kinetic energy dissipated—"
"Yeah, we know. Well, you didn't kill us," laughed Hammond. "So let's go out and take a look at the wonders of the Telfan scenery."
"Take a quick look," said McBride. "Here come some Telfans to take a look at some Terran science."
"Wonder how they got here so quick," asked Timkins of no one in particular.
"Ask 'em."
Timkins stepped out of the space lock and smiled at the Telfans. "Ave, Canis Majoris," he said in a deep voice.
"Lousy Latin," snorted McBride.
"That's where they live."
"Do they know that?"
The foremost Telfan, who was Tet'h, stepped forward and smiled. "You ... Terrans?"
"Yes."
He pointed to the ship. "'Aywire Queen?"
"Yes."
Tet'h smiled once more and offered his hand.
"Universal gesture?" asked Hammond.
"No. Drake must have taught them that."
"Drake?" asked Tet'h. "You like?"
"Extremely doubtful," said Hammond. He was misunderstood. McBride said nothing but that pinching of the nose between thumb and forefinger conveyed the idea excellently.
"Telfans ... no like Drake."
"No?"
"No. Tall. Ugly-bald." Tet'h indicated his own luxurious pelt and then became confused as he realized that the Terrans were of the same, "Ugly-bald" complexion. He covered his face with both hands and muttered something that sounded apologetic and humble.
"Forget it," laughed McBride. "We ... like Telfans."
"Not like Drake," said Tet'h.
"Thanks," said Hammond honestly.
"How know ... here?" asked Timkins.
"You here?" asked Tet'h pointing to the ship and the surrounding landscape.
"Aren't we?" grinned Timkins.
"Save the fine rhetoric for later when they get the point of double talk," suggested Hammond.
Tet'h led them to the plane and Gormal and Elyon lifted a large case out. Tet'h opened it and handed McBride a little instrument. It was a cabinetless job, every part exposed.
"Holy spinach," he said. "A mechanogravitic detector."
Hammond got a small mechanical planetarium showing Telfu and a minute sphere. Tet'h pulled a roller-map out of the base and indicated Telfu and the sphere. The map was a fairly accurate contour map of the blanketed region's contour.
Tet'h signified the cusp and then pointed to the position of Soaky. Below the cusp, Tet'h indicated the planet and then pointed to the ground.
"Here," he said.
McBride and Hammond tangled in an effort to shake Tet'h's hand. The Telfan looked proud.
"Many years," he said haltingly. "Work," indicating the detector. He made assembly motions. He pulled a book of mathematical identities from a pocket and said: "Found ... here." Then he made vast motions indicating a large construction. "Many years ... try like hell ... no work." He indicated the small satellite. "He make stop."
"Bright lads," grinned Hammond. "Their civilization was ready to discover the gravitic spectra. They did. They found it in math. They tried it and it didn't click too well. They discovered why. Never having anything of any great power operating, they never got to the point where they could build anything big enough to get off of Telfu. Just plain stuck. Well, fellers, if that moonlet is cupralum, I can see a lot of birds mining it."
"How're they going to land on it? Nothing gravitic will be worth a hoot that close."
"Lift 'em off the dead spot by battery-powered gravitics. Inefficient as hell. Get into space and then use rockets to land on that moonlet. Mine it. Load it full of detonite and blast."
"A hundred-mile moonlet?"
"They've got a nine-thousand-mile planet here to support it. They can't power their machinery with gravitrons, but electronics is an art worth remembering. One of the earlier atomic gadgets would do plenty."
"Might bore a large hole in it and pack in a mile of Atomite," suggested McBride. "I'd hate to support that, though."
"Better get some seetee meteors and pelt it by remote control," said Hammond. "Well, we can cover that later." To Tet'h he said: "You come in?"
Tet'h and Thani held a quick conference. "She come, too?" he asked.
"All of you."
"No. They stay. We go Terra."
"Terra!" exploded Hammond.
"Much to learn—both of us. You and I. You learn Telfan. We learn Terran. Better talk. This ... lousy."
"Easy to see Sandra's delicate hand in this language lesson," grinned Timkins.
"Better call that wild woman. Tell her we're going to take off in one hour and ten minutes because if we don't, we'll be as stuck as she is and we don't like that. As long as we have a bit of Telfu to take back with us in the shape of Tet'h and his woman Thani, we needn't stick around. I'll feel better about getting off on this rotation anyway. G'wan, we'll listen to you make the excuses, Larry."
"My turn to poke her on the pretty little schnozzola?"
"You won that by that three times something to the minus umpty-umpth power percentage of landing error. Twelve feet in what?"
"2,630,000,000,000,000,000 feet."
"Was that the same he said before?" asked McBride with a smile. "Or was he working that old gag about our not remembering?"
"I don't remember either."
"So, you win," said McBride to Larry Timkins.
Timkins called, and Sandra Drake's slightly hysterical voice replied.
"How you doing?" asked Larry.
"Where are you?"
"I don't know."
"Don't know?" said Sandra. Her voice went up in a crescendo and hit "G" above High "C" on the last note.
"No," said Larry. "Chicago, Venuland, Canalport, and Sharon are my best landmarks and they're all equally distant and in the same direction from here."
"Go to hell."
"That's across the River Styx from Sharon, on Pluto," said Timkins. "And that expression is making the Sharonites unhappy because people have been going there for thousands of years. Sharon hasn't the popularity."
"But look, Larry, I want to go along."
"Can you get here in one hour and eleven minutes. That's the absolute deadline until we can get to Terra and cook up a drive that's detuned enough from the cupralum-absorption region to permit us to tinker off and on around here."
"Where are you? How can I get there if you don't know where you are?"
"Ask someone."
Sandra's language became something that the communications commission has legislated against.
"Can you come here and get me?"
"We'll be doing fine if we get off with our skin," said Larry. "We definitely have not enough power to go roaming all over Telfu. We're on the one spot that will allow us to leave under the emergencies. An hour and thirty minutes from now that spot will be somewhere else. We'll wait an hour and ten and take off on the edge of the spot."
"Won't they come back and get me?"
"Wait a minute." Then he turned to Tet'h. "Could you send them back for Drake?"
"Yes," answered Tet'h. "Better not, though. She bad ... but lazy. Teach Terran so not ... learn Telfan."
"Sandra? No dice. That's it, toots. Take it or leave it."
"Look, Larry, isn't there something you can do?"
"I doubt it. Give you a tip, though. Next time you poke someone else's nose into a mess remember that he who laughs last isn't always too dumb to catch on quick. At the next sound, it will be exactly three people making with deep belly laughs. So long, until we meet again—in about six months! In-you, we're at these Telfan co-ordicidentally, if you should find someone who would like to get rid of nates: South Longitude.... Hey, Tet'h, how do you pronounce these figures?"
Tet'h caught his meaning and said: "Me tell."
He addressed the microphone, and spoke in Telfan. "There," he finished, "is where ... are!"
Timkins added: "So now you can get here all right."
He closed the mike as the speaker started to make little animal sounds. "Fellows," said Larry. "She's mad!"
"Crazy mad or angry mad?"
"Boiling mad."
"She'll be hard-boiled by the time she gets through stewing in her own juice," grinned Hammond. "Let's get some sky, fellows. O.K. ... we go?" he asked Tet'h.
"We go," said Tet'h cheerfully.
There was a quick conference between the two men who were to stay and Tet'h. Then the air-lock door was closed, and Timkins started to set up the controls.
Up in the emergency room, the batteries started to fume and fret as the terrible overload hit them. TheHaywire Queenlifted uncertainly, gained a little speed, and then took off into the cloudless sky at an acceleration that varied continuously between nine to twenty feet per second per second per second under the super drive.
Not too long after, the gravitron-cupralum drive took over, and theHaywire Queenpointed her dome upwards at tiny Sol, blinking there in the sky between the constellations Aquila and Ophiuchus.
THE END.