"Surely you're joking, doctor. The Pilman Radiant is a concept known to every schoolchild."

"That doesn't surprise me. According to some sources, the Pilman Radiant was discovered by a schoolboy. Unfortunately, I don't remember his name. Look it up in Stetson's History of the Visitation—it's described in full detail there. His version is that the radiant was discovered by a schoolboy, that a college student published the coordinates, but that for some unknown reason it was named after me."

"Yes, many amazing things can happen with a discovery. Would you mind explaining it to our listeners, Dr. Pilman?"

"The Pilman Radiant is simplicity itself. Imagine that you spin a huge globe and you start firing bullets into it. The bullet holes would lie on the surface in a smooth curve. The whole point of what you call my first serious discovery lies in the simple fact that all six Visitation Zones are situated on the surface of our planet as though someone had taken six shots at Earth from a pistol located somewhere along the Earth-Deneb line. Deneb is the alpha star in Cygnus. The point in the heavens from which, so to speak, the shots came is the Pilman Radiant."

"Thank you, doctor. My fellow Harmonites! Finally we have heard a clear explanation of the Pilman Radiant! By the way, the day before yesterday was the thirtieth anniversary of the Visitation. Dr. Pilman, would you care to say a few words to your fellow townsmen on the subject?"

"What in particular interests you? Remember, I wasn't in Harmont at the time."

"That makes it even more interesting to hear what you felt when your hometown became the site of an invasion from a supercivilization from space."

"To tell the truth, I first thought it was a hoax. It was hard to imagine that anything like that could possibly happen in our little Harmont. Gobi or Newfoundland seemed more likely than Harmont."