nearly an hour with it, converting it into a telescope with turns in one direction, a microscope with turns in the other.
'How does it work?' Brandon kept asking.
'I don't know,' Moore kept saying. In the end he said, 'I'm sure it involves concentrated force fields. We are turning against considerable field resistance. With larger instruments, power adjustment will be required.'
'It's a pretty cute trick,' said Shea.
'It's more than that,' said Moore. 'I'll bet it represents a completely new turn in theoretical physics. It focuses light without lenses, and it can be adjusted to gather light over a wider and wider area without any change in focal length. I'll bet we could duplicate the five-hundred-inch Ceres telescope in one direction and an electron microscope in the other. What's more, I don't see any chromatic aberration, so it must bend light of all wavelengths equally. Maybe it bends radio waves and gamma rays also. Maybe it distorts gravity, if gravity is some kind of radiation. Maybe-'
'Worth money?' asked Shea, breaking in dryly.
'All kinds if someone can figure out how it works.'
'Then we don't go to Trans-space Insurance with this. We go to a lawyer first. Did we sign these things away with our salvage rights or didn't we? You had them already in your possession before signing the paper. For that matter, is the paper any good if we didn't know what we were signing away? Maybe it might be considered fraud.'
'As a matter of fact,' said Moore, 'with something like this, I don't know if any private company ought to own it. We ought to check with some government agency. If there's money in it-'
But Brandon was pounding both fists on his knees. To hell with the money, Warren. I mean, I'll take any money that comes my way but that's not the important thing. We're going to be famous, man, famous! Imagine the story. A fabulous treasure lost in space. A giant corporation combing space for twenty years to find it and all the time we, the forgotten ones, have it in our possession. Then, on the twentieth anniversary of the original loss, we find it again.
If this thing works, if anoptics becomes a great new scientific technique, they'll never forget us.'
Moore grinned, then started laughing. That's right. You did it, Mark. You did just what you set out to do.
You've rescued us from being marooned in oblivion.'
'We all did it,' said Brandon. 'Mike Shea started us off with the necessary basic information. I worked out the theory, and you had the instrument.'
'Okay. It's late, and the wife will be back soon, so let's get the ball rolling right away. Multivac will tell us which agency would be appropriate and who-'
'No, no,' said Brandon. 'Ritual first. The closing toast of the anniversary the appropriate change. Won't you oblige Warren?' He passed over the still half-full bottle of Jabra Water.
Carefully, Moore filled each small glass precisely to the brim. 'Gentlemen,' he said solemnly, 'a toast.' The three raised the glasses in unison. 'Gentlemen, I give you the Silver Queen souvenirs we used to have.'
***
I am ashamed to say that the idea for this story occurred to me when I read the obituary of a fellow science fiction writer in the New York Times and began to wonder whether my own obituary, when it came, would be as long. From that to this story was but a tiny little step.
Obituary
My husband, Lancelot, always reads the paper at breakfast. What I see of him when he first appears is his lean, abstracted face, carrying its perpetual look of angry and slightly puzzled frustration. He doesn't greet me, and the newspaper, carefully unfolded in readiness for him, goes up before his face.
Thereafter, there is only his arm, emerging from behind the paper for a second cup of coffee into which I have carefully placed the necessary level teaspoonful of sugar- neither heaping nor deficient under pain of a stinging glare.
I am no longer sorry for this. It makes for a quiet meal, at least.
However, on this morning the quiet was broken when Lancelot barked out abruptly, 'Good Lord! That fool Paul Farber is dead. Stroke!'
I just barely recognized the name. Lancelot had mentioned him on occasion, so I knew him as a colleague, as another theoretical physicist. From my husband's exasperated epithet, I felt reasonably sure he was a moderately famous one who had achieved the success that had eluded Lancelot.
He put down the paper and stared at me angrily. 'Why do they fill