'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 obituaries with such lying trash?' he demanded. They make him out to be a second Einstein for no better reason than that he died of a stroke.'
If there was one subject I had learned to avoid, it was that of obituaries. I dared not even nod agreement.
He threw down the paper and walked away and out the room, leaving his eggs half-finished and his second cup of coffee untouched.
I sighed. What else could I do? What else could I ever do?
Of course, my husband's name isn't really Lancelot Stebbins, because I am changing names and circumstances, as far as I can, to protect the guilty. However, the point is that even if I used real names you would not recognize my husband.
Lancelot had a talent in that respect-a talent for being passed over, for going unnoticed. His discoveries are invari ably anticipated, or blurred by the presence of a greater made simultaneously. At scientific conventions his papers are poorly attended because another paper of greater importance is being given in another section.
Naturally this has had its effect on him. It changed him.
When I first married him, twenty-five years ago, he was a sparkling catch. He was well-to-do through inheritance and already a trained physicist with an intense ambition and great promise. As for myself, I believe myself to have been pretty then, but that didn't last. What did last was my introversion and my failure to be the kind of social success an ambitious young faculty member needs for a wife.
Perhaps that was part of Lancelot's talent for going unnoticed. Had he married another kind of wife, she might have made him visible in her radiation.
Did he realize that himself after a while? Was that why he grew away from me after the first two or three reasonably happy years? Sometimes I believed this and bitterly blamed myself.
But then I would think it was only his thirst for fame, which grew for being unslaked. He left his position on the faculty and built a laboratory of his own far outside town, for the sake, he said, of cheap land and of isolation.
Money was no problem. In his field, the government was generous with its grants and those he could always get. On top of that, he used our own money without limit.
I tried to withstand him. I said, 'But it's not necessary, Lancelot. It's not as though we have financial worries. It's not as though they're not willing to let you remain on the university staff. All I want are children and a normal life.'
But there was a burning inside him that blinded him to everything else. He turned angrily on me. 'There is something that must come first. The world of science must recognize me for what I am, for a-a-great investigator.'
At that time, he still hesitated to apply the term genius to himself.
It didn't help. The fall of chance remained always and perpetually against him. His laboratory hummed with work; he hired assistants at excellent salaries; he drove himself roughly and pitilessly. Nothing came of it.
I kept hoping he would give up someday; return to the city; allow us to lead a normal, quiet life. I waited, but always when he might have admitted defeat, some new battle would be taken up, some new attempt to storm the bastions of fame. Each time he charged with such hope and fell back in such despair.
And always he turned on me; for if he was ground down by the world, he could always grind me in return. I am not a brave person, but I was coming to believe I must leave him.
And yet…
In this last year he had obviously been girding himself for another battle. A last one, I thought. There was something about him more intense, more a-quiver than I had ever seen before. There was the way he murmured to himself and laughed briefly at nothing. There were the times he went for days without food and nights without sleep. He even took to keeping laboratory notebooks in a bedroom safe as though he feared even his own assistants.