"But you—?"
"Remember, my hobby is photography. Photography itself is a matter of fantastic illusion. Your eyes, fallible as any sense, view a collection of light rays in a certain pattern and your brain says it is Uncle Julius. Iconography, when enlarged to life-size, can produce a solid image that from a distance can be mistaken. Iconocinematography does not produce a solid image but establishes a radiating point for heterodyned light, producing an apparent image that the real thing can go up and shake hands with—providing his timing is good, for the image is unreal.
"So there's Black Morgan. Since he could not exist in fact, he did exist in the interpretation of incomplete data. Any man can fudge a detector by supplying false echoes from a delayed transponder. Anybody can project a super image of a spacecraft by iconocinematography. And a spacesuit is capable of considerable motion of its own, plus the ability to cling like a leech to the hull of a ship under acceleration.
"At first I was a bit concerned about the effect of attacking an armed ship with an icono image—but I discovered that Black Morgan's real ship was as unarmed as any commerce vessel. He was the real fantasy!"
Captain Edwards smiled. "A good man, Jeffries," he said to his superiors. "And a good big man can still take a good little man's tricks and turn them against him!"
And Lieutenant Jeffries took a deep breath. "Now, sir," he said. "About that vacation—?"
THE END.