“We need to observe Trisolaris right now!” General Fitzroy said to Dr. Ringier. They were in the control room of the Hubble II Space Telescope, a week after its assembly was completed.
“General, I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
“I have the feeling that the observations in progress right now are actually private work that you astronomers are doing on the side.”
“I’d have done my own work if it were possible, but Hubble II is still in the testing phase.”
“You’re working for the military. Carrying out orders is all you need to do.”
“No one here is military apart from you. We’re following NASA’s testing plan.”
The general’s tone softened. “Doctor, can’t you just use Trisolaris as a test target?”
“Test targets have been carefully selected according to distance and brightness classes, and the test plan has been formulated to be maximally economical, so that the telescope completes all tests after just one rotation. In order to observe Trisolaris now, we would need to rotate through an angle of nearly thirty degrees and back, and spinning this bad boy uses up propellant. We’re saving the military money, General.”
“Let’s have a look at how you’re saving it, then. I just found this on your computer,” Fitzroy said as he brought a hand out from behind his back. He held a printout of a photograph, an overhead shot of a group of people looking upward excitedly. They were recognizably the crew from this very control room, Ringier in their midst, along with three women in sexy poses who might have been the girlfriends of some in the group. The location of the photo was evidently the roof of the control room building, and the photo was very clear, as if it had been shot from ten or twenty meters above. Where it differed from an ordinary photograph was in the complicated numbers overlaid atop it. “Doctor, you’re standing on the highest point of the building. It doesn’t have a rocker arm like a movie set, does it? You’re telling me that rotating Hubble II thirty degrees costs money. Well, how much does it cost to rotate it three hundred sixty degrees? Besides, that ten-million-dollar investment wasn’t made so you could snap photos of you and your girlfriends from space. Should I add that sum to your bill?”
“General, your order must of course be carried out,” Ringier said hastily, and the engineers immediately went to work.
Coordinate data was quickly called up from the target database. In space, the enormous cylinder, over twenty meters in diameter and more than a hundred meters long, slowly started to turn, panning across the starfield displayed on the screen in the control room.
“This is what the telescope sees?” asked the general.
“No, this is just the image returned by the positioning system. The telescope returns still photos that need to be processed before they’re viewable.”
Five minutes later, the panning stopped. The control system reported that positioning had been achieved, and after another five minutes, Ringier said, “Good. Now return to the test position.”
In surprise, Fitzroy asked, “What? Is it done?”
“Yes. Now the images are being processed.”
“Can’t you take a few more?”
“General, we’ve captured two hundred ten images at multiple focal lengths.” At that moment the first observation image finished processing, and Ringier pointed to the screen. “Look, General. There’s the enemy world you want to see so badly.”
Fitzroy saw nothing but a group of three halos against a dark background. They were diffuse, like streetlights through fog. These were the three stars that would decide the fate of two civilizations.
“So we really can’t see the planet.” Fitzroy couldn’t hide his disappointment.
“Of course we can’t. Even when the hundred-meter Hubble III is finished, we’ll only be able to observe Trisolaris at a very few set positions, and we’ll only be able to make it out as a dot, with no detail at all.”
“But there’s something else here, Doctor. What do you think this is?” asked one of the engineers, pointing to a spot close to the three halos.
Fitzroy leaned in but saw nothing. It was so faint that only an expert could catch it.
“It’s got a diameter larger than a star,” an engineer said.
After enlarging the area several times, the thing covered the entire screen.
“It’s a brush!” shouted the general in alarm.
The layman always comes up with better names than the expert, which is why when experts name things they, too, work from an outsider’s perspective. And thus “brush” became the figure’s name, because the general’s description was accurate: It was a cosmic brush. Or, to be more precise, a set of cosmic bristles without a handle. Of course, you could also see it as hair standing on end.
“It must be a scratch in the coating! I mentioned in the feasibility study that a paste-up lens would cause problems,” Ringier said, shaking his head.
“All the coatings have been through stringent testing. A scratch of this sort wouldn’t happen. And it’s not generated by any other lens flaw, either. We’ve already returned tens of thousands of test images, and it’s never come up before,” said an expert from Zeiss, the lens’s manufacturer.
A hush fell over the control room. They all gathered to stare up at the image on the screen until it got so crowded that some of them called up the image on other terminals. Fitzroy sensed the change in the room’s atmosphere: People who had grown lazy from the fatigue of lengthy tests were anxious now, like they had been hit by a curse that rooted everything in place but their eyes, which grew ever brighter.
“God!” exclaimed several people at the same time.
The frozen formation abruptly turned into excited activity. The snatches of dialogue Fitzroy picked up were a bit too technical for him.
“Any dust around the target’s position? Check it—”
“No need. I completed that item. Observing the absorption of the background stellar radial movement, there’s an absorption peak at two hundred millimeters. It may be a carbon microparticle, F-class density.”
“Any opinions on the effect of high-speed impact?”
“The wake diffuses along the impact axis, but the diffusion scope… Do we have a model of that?”
“Yes. One moment…. Here it is. Impact speed?”
“A hundred times third cosmic velocity.”
“Is it already that high?”
“That’s a conservative figure…. For the impact cross section, use… Right, that’s right. That’s just about it. Just a rough estimate.”
With the experts busy, Ringier stood next to Fitzroy. “General, can you try your best to count the bristles in the brush?”
The general nodded, and then bent over a terminal and began counting.
The computer needed four or five minutes to complete every calculation, but there were a number of errors, so it was half an hour before the results were ready.
“The wake diffuses the dust to a maximum diameter of two hundred forty thousand kilometers, or twice the size of Jupiter,” the astronomer running the mathematical model said.
“That makes sense,” Ringier said. He raised his arms and looked up at the ceiling, as if looking through it to the heavens. “And that confirms it.” There was a tremble to his voice, and then, as if to himself, he said, “So it’s been confirmed. Nothing wrong with that.”