"Take a swing at it, Guy."
"It's a maze to me," admitted Guy. "Let me see the circuits."
It took Maynard some time to figure them out. He was working from memory now, and it was none too good, plus the fact that he had memorized the complex circuit in Ertinian symbols and in Ertinian constants, and they all required conversion to Terran terms. He called for the group leaders of the various components, and asked them to report on the functions of their parts.
Together, they pinned the error down, and corrected it. Then Maynard turned the thing on himself.
The broad plate took on a gray-green background, mottled with huge circular blotches of white. He turned the focusing knob, and the mottling contracted into individual circles of intense, flaming white. He reduced the intensity control, and the eye-searing brightness dimmed to a more comfortable level. More fiddling with the focus, with alternate adjustment of the intensity, for they were inter-reacting, and the plate took on the appearance of the sky.
"So far so good. Now for the shaping control," said Maynard. He drove the left hand end swirling upward on the plate with one knob, stretched the stars across the top of the plate, and compressed them along the right side. He caused them to whirl circularly, and gradually the distortion dropped until the constellations appeared.
"There you are," he told the chief technician.
"Fine. Now what can we do?"
"Well, there aren't too many planets," said Maynard. "We can decrease the response of celestial bodies that shine by reflected light. That one," he said needlessly, since they all knew it well, "is Jupiter. Watch him fade!" and Maynard turned the knob. After the demonstration, he returned it to its original position again.