ALVAN WREN, POISED beside a transparent port in the side of the service rocket, gazed out with considerable interest. The object of his attention, hanging a few miles away and slowly drifting closer, was not too imposing at first glance; merely a metal globe gleaming in the sunlight, the reflection from its surface softened by a second, concentric, semitransparent envelope. At this distance it did not even look very large; there was no indication that more than seventy years of time and two hundred million dollars in effort had already been expended upon that inner globe, although it was still far from completion. It had absorbed in that time, on an average, almost a quarter of the yearly income from a gigantic research “sinking fund” set up by contributions from every institution of learning on Earth; and — unlike most research projects so early in their careers — had already shown a sizable profit.

More detail began to show on both spheres, as the rocket eased closer. The outer envelope lost its appearance of translucent haze and showed itself to be a silver lacework — a metallic mesh screen surrounding the more solid core. Wren knew its purpose was to shield the delicate circuits within from interference when Sol spouted forth his streams of electrons; it was all he did know about the structure, for Alvan Wren had a very poor grounding in the physical sciences. He was a psychologist, with enough letters after his name to shout down anyone who decried his intelligence, but the language of volts and amperes, ergs and dynes was strange to him.

The pilot of the rocket was not acquainted with his passenger, and his remarks were not particularly helpful.

“We ought to make contact in about fifteen minutes,” he said. “We’re not supposed to use rockets close to the machine, and we have to brake down to safe contact speed at least twenty miles away.