The Bryd could have stayed Dale's hand for a while, but the Bryd very much believed in minding its own business. It didn't like to interfere with humans; that was policy. So it decided to get busy. It had a quarter of a second to find out things and decide what, if anything, to do about them. Certainly it couldn't expect to stay comfortably in a mind as upset as Dale Stevenson's ... so it got busy.
The first thing to do was get oriented. The Bryd took a quick look around. Dale Stevenson, doctor of physics, was in charge of this sun-station, which was a man-made island in space, some three miles in diameter. The rim of the island was composed mainly of a steel framework like the rim of a wheel, with little cabins at various intervals to house a power plant, various controls, rocket berths, repair shops, and living quarters for the sun-station's crew.
The center area of the sun-station was a giant mirror, three miles across, made up of thin sheets of metallic sodium fastened to a skeleton of wire nets. The sodium was very light in weight, and being in airless and heatless space, was inert. Also it was highly reflective.
The whole business was kept at a point approximately 5,100 miles from Earth, where Earth's gravitational attraction approached neutrality and where the entire space-station could be maintained in a given position or moved at will with a minimum expenditure of energy.
Technically the station was owned by Night Sun, Inc., along with nearly a hundred others around Earth, and this particular station, No. 18, was under contract to furnish illumination at night over Paris, France, by staying out of Earth's shadow and reflecting sunlight on Paris during the night.
Management of such a station involved many mathematical factors in distance, triangulation with Paris, velocity and angulation, and control of the curve of the mirror. Normally this was a parabolic curve, but it was constantly varied with other factors to produce the desired degree of illumination.
No. 18 was under the sole control of Dale Stevenson, who had been psych-tested and certified by the United Nations licensing board.
That made the Bryd feel a little better. It looked as if he had made a mistake twenty-four years ago, but it also looked as if the licensing board had been fooled within the last year, for Dale certainly was getting ready to cause a lot of trouble in Paris. He could actuate the controls to expand or contract the rim of the station and thus vary the focal length of the sodium lens, and if he should actually concentrate the sun's rays in a small area, he could draw a flaming path of ruin through the center of Paris.
Reluctantly the Bryd checked again, and found that that was exactly what Dale Stevenson was about to do. The Bryd wondered why. It groaned. Humans were always up to something. Why couldn't they relax so the Bryd could rest?