LEAVE NO TURN UNSTONED!
"Where does it come from?" asked Pollard innocently.
"Take a fifteen-degree angle from the middle of Boötes. Maybe Arcturus for all we know. Somewhere within fifteen degrees of an arbitrary point up there. A total conic solid angle of thirty degrees will encompass all but wisps of the stuff that filter through once in a year or so."
"And the velocity of propagation?"
"That's the simplest thing to check. The pulses from the Lawson Radiation follow random patterns. A segment printed along a time-scale can be matched to another segment of the same radiation taken from the other side of the solar system.
"It's never perfect enough to do more than approximate the answer, but we've got to get a lot more dispersion than the breadth of the orbit of the planet Pluto before we can detect any time-delay—and if we go too far the synchronization of our test equipment gets more and more difficult. You guess."
Pollard thought for a moment. "I can't hope to know all the angles," he said. "This is sufficient until I have to know more about it. Now tell me what might drive a man into instability?"
"You tell us," laughed Majors shortly. His laugh was not genuine for he felt the loss of Carroll deeply.
"Is there any insoluble dilemma in this at all?"
"Not that we know of."