“My advice is to go straight back to Pasadena, get your team together, and aim to write a report within a week, setting out the situation as you see it. Get all your men to sign it — so that there’s no question of the tale getting around of a mad Director. And then come back to Washington.
“In the meantime I’ll get things moving at this end. It isn’t a bit of good in a case like this starting at the bottom by whispering into the ear of some Congressman. The only thing to do is to go straight to the President. I’ll try to smooth your path there.”
A Meeting in London
Four days earlier in London a remarkable meeting had been held in the rooms of the Royal Astronomical Society. The meeting had been called, not by the Royal Astronomical Society itself, but by the British Astronomical Association, an association essentially of amateur astronomers.
Chris Kingsley, Professor of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge, travelled by train in the early afternoon to London for the meeting. It was unusual for him, the most theoretical of theoreticians, to be attending a meeting of amateur observers. But there had been rumours of unaccounted discrepancies in the positions of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Kingsley didn’t believe it, but he felt that scepticism should rest on solid ground, so he ought to hear what the chaps had to say about it.