mersmith said. “Do you want me to bail you out, or not? If
not, I’d rather be with Helen than standing around listening
to you.”
“What do you propose to do,” Arpe said, finding it impos-
sible not to be frosty, “that we aren’t doing already?”
“Teach you your business,” Hammersmith said. “I presume
you’ve established our distance from S Doradus for a starter.
Once I have that, I can use the star as a beacon, to collimate
my next measurements. Then I want the use of an image
amplifier, with a direct-reading microvoltmeter tied into the
circuit; you ought to have such a thing, as a routine instru-
ment.”
Stauffer pointed it out silently.
“Good.” Hammersmith sat down and began to scan the
stars with the amplifier. The meter silently reported the light
output of each, as minute pulses of electricity. Hammersmith
watched it with a furious intensity. At last he took off his
wrist chronometer and begun to time the movements of the
needle with the stop watch.
“Bull’s-eye,” he said suddenly.
“The Sun?” Arpe asked, unable to keep his tone from
dripping with disbelief.
“No. That one is DQ Herculisan old nova. It’s a micro-
variable. It varies by four hundredths of a magnitude every
sixty-four seconds. Now we have two stars to fill our para-
meters; maybe the computer could give us the Sun from
those? Let’s try it, anyhow.”
Stauffer tried it. The computer had decided to be obtuse
today. It did, however, narrow the region of search to a small
sector of sky, containing approximately sixty stars.
“Does the Sun do something like that?” Oestreicher said.