'There was a bunch of metal junk in the pile,' agreed Shea.

'They'd leave that in space if it were papers they were after. So that's what we want, an instrument that might be called an optikon.'

'Even if all your theories were correct, Mark, and we're looking for an optikon, the search is absolutely hopeless now,' said Moore flatly. 'I doubt that more than ten per cent of the debris would remain in orbit about Vesta. Vesta's escape velocity is practically nothing. It was just a lucky thrust in a lucky direction and at a lucky velocity that put our section of the wreck in orbit. The rest is gone, scattered all over the Solar System in any conceivable orbit about the Sun,'

They've been picking up pieces,' said Brandon.

'Yes, the ten per cent that managed to make a Vestan orbit out of it. That's all.'

Brandon wasn't giving up. He said thoughtfully, 'Suppose it were there and they hadn't found it. Could someone have beat them to it ?'

Mike Shea laughed. 'We were right there, but we sure didn't walk off with anything but our skins; and glad to do that much. Who else?'

That's right,' agreed Moore, 'and if anyone else picked it up, why are they keeping it a secret?'

'Maybe they don't know what it is.'

Then how do we go about--' Moore broke off and turned to Shea, 'What did you say?'

Shea looked blank. 'Who, me?'

'Just now, about us being there.' Moore's eyes narrowed. He shook his head as though to clear it, then whispered, 'Great Galaxy!'

'What is it?' asked Brandon tensely. 'What's the matter. Warren?'

'I'm not sure. You're driving me mad with your theories; so mad, I'm beginning to take them seriously, I think. You know, we did take some things out of the wreck with us. I mean besides our clothes and what personal belongings we still had. Or at least I did.'

What?'

'It was when I was making my way across the outside of the wreckage-space, I seem to be there now, I see it so clearly-I picked up some items and put them in the pocket of my spacesuit. I don't know why; I wasn't myself, really. I did it without thinking. And then, well, I held on to them. Souvenirs, I suppose. I brought them back to Earth.'

'Where are they?'

'I don't know. We haven't stayed in one place, you know.'

'You didn't throw them out, did you ?'

'No, but things do get lost when you move.'

'If you didn't throw them out, they must be somewhere in this house.'

'If they didn't get lost. I swear I don't recall seeing them in fifteen years.'

'What were they?'

Warren Moore said, 'One was a fountain pen, as I recall; a real antique, the kind that used an ink-spray cartridge. What gets me, though, is that the other was a small field glass, not more than about six inches long. You see what I mean? A field glass?'

'An optikon,' shouted Brandon. 'Sure!'

'It's just a coincidence,' said Moore, trying to remain levelheaded. 'Just a curious coincidence.'

But Brandon wasn't having it. 'A coincidence, nuts I Trans-space couldn't find the optikon on the wreck and they couldn't find it in space because you had it all along.'

'Your crazy.'

'Come on, we've got to find the thing now.'

ell, I'll look, if that's what Moore blew out his breath. 'Well, I'll look, if that's what you want, but I doubt I'll find it. Okay, let's start with the storage level. That's the logical place.'

Shea chuckled. The logical place is usually the worst place to look.' But they all headed for the power ramp once more and the additional flight upward.

The storage level had a musty, unused odor to it. Moore turned on the precipitron. 'I don't think we've precipitated the dust in two years. That shows you how often I'm up here. Now, let's see-if it's anywhere at all, it would be in with the bachelor collection. I mean the junk I've been hanging on to since bachelor days. We can start here.'

Moore started leafing through the contents of plastic collapsibles while Brandon kept peering anxiously over his shoulder.

Moore said, 'What do you know ? My college yearbook. I was a sonist in those days; a real bug on it. In fact, I managed to get a voice recording with the picture of every senior in this book.' He tapped its cover fondly. 'You could swear there was nothing there but the usual trimensional photos, but each one has an imprisoned--'

He grew aware of Brandon's frown and said, 'Okay, I'll keep looking.'

He gave up on the collapsibles and opened a trunk of heavy, old-fashioned woodite. He separated the contents of the various compartments.

Brandon said 'Hey, is that it?'

He pointed to a small cylinder that rolled out on the floor with a small clunk.

Moore said, 'I don't--Yes! that's the pen. There it is.

And here's the field glass. Neither one works, of course. They're both broken. At least, I suppose the pen's broken. Something's loose and rattles in it. Hear? I wouldn't have the slightest idea about how to fill it so I can check whether it really works. They haven't even made ink-spray cartridges in years.'

Brandon held it under the light. 'It has initials on it'

'Oh ? I don't remember noticing any.'

'It's pretty worn down. It looks like J.K.Q.'

'Q?'.

'Right, and that's an unusual letter with which to start a last name. This pen might have belonged to Quentin. An heirloom he kept for luck or sentiment. It might have belonged to a great-grandfather in the days when they used pens like this; a great-grandfather called Jason Knight Quentin or Judah Kent Quentin or something like that. We can check the names of Quentin's ancestors through Multivac.'

Moore nodded. 'I think maybe we should. See, you've got me as crazy as you are.'

'And if this is so, it proves you picked it up in Quentin's room. So you picked up the field glass there too.'

'Now hold it. I don't remember that I picked them up in the same place. I don't remember the scrounging over the outside of the wreck that well.'

Brandon turned the small field glass over and over under the light. 'No initials here.'

'Did you expect any?'

'I don't see anything, in fact, except this narrow joining mark here.' He ran his thumbnail into the fine groove that circled the glass near its thicker end. He tried to twist it unsuccessfully. 'One piece.' He put it to his eye. This thing doesn't work.'

'I told you it was broken. No lenses--'

Shea broke in. 'You've got to expect a little damage when a spaceship hits a good-sized meteor and goes to pieces.'

'So even if this were it,' said Moore, pessimistic again, 'if this were the optikon, it would not do us any good.'

He took the field glass from Brandon and felt along the empty rims. 'You can't even tell where the lenses belonged. There's no groove I can feel into which they might have been seated. It's as if there never--Hey!' He exploded the syllable violently.

'Hey what?' said Brandon.

The name! The name of the thing!'

'Optikon, you mean?'

'Optikon, I don't mean! Fitzsimmons, on the tube, called it an optikon and we thought he said "an optikon." '

'Well, he did,' said Brandon.

'Sure' said Shea. 'I heard him.'

'You just thought you heardhim. He said "anoptikon." Don't you get it? not an "optikon," two words, "anopti-kon" one word. Brandon blankly.'And what's the difference?'

'A hell of a difference. "An optikon" would mean instrument with lenses, but "anoptikon," one word, has the Greek prefix "an-" which means "no." Words of Greek derivation use it for "no." Anarchy means "no government," anemia means "no blood," anonymous means "no name," and anoptikon means--'

'No lenses,' cried Brandon.

'Right! Quentin must have been working on an optical device without lenses and this may be it and it may not be broken.'

Shea said, 'But you don't see anything when you look through it.'

'It must be set to neutral,' said Moore. There must be some way of adjusting it.' Like Brandon, he placed it in both hands and tried to twist it about that circumscribing groove. He placed pressure on it, grunting.

'Don't break it,' said Brandon.

'It's giving. Either it's supposed to be stiff or else it's corroded shut.' He stopped, looked at the instrument impatiently, and put it to his eye again. He whirled, unpolarized a window and looked out at the lights of the city.

'I'll be dumped in space,' he breathed.

Brandon said, 'What? What?'

Moore handed the instrument to Brandon wordlessly. Brandon put it to his eyes and cried out sharply, 'It's a telescope.'

Shea said at once, 'Let me see.'

They spent nearly an hour with it, converting it into a telescope with turns in one direction, a microscope with turns in the other.

'How does it work?' Brandon kept asking.

'I don't know,' Moore kept saying. In the end he said, 'I'm sure it involves concentrated force fields. We are turning against considerable field resistance. With larger instruments, power adjustment will be required.'

'It's a pretty cute trick,' said Shea.

'It's more than that,' said Moore. 'I'll bet it represents a completely new turn in theoretical physics. It focuses light without lenses, and it can be adjusted to gather light over a wider and wider area without any change in focal length. I'll bet we could duplicate the five-hundred-inch Ceres telescope in one direction and an electron microscope in the other. What's more, I don't see any chromatic aberration, so it must bend light of all wavelengths equally. Maybe it bends radio waves and gamma rays also. Maybe it distorts gravity, if gravity is some kind of radiation. Maybe--'

'Worth money?' asked Shea, breaking in dryly.

'All kinds if someone can figure out how it works.'

'Then we don't go to Trans-space Insurance with this. We go to a lawyer first. Did we sign these things away with our salvage rights or didn't we? You had them already in your possession before signing the paper. For that matter, is the paper any good if we didn't know what we were signing away ? Maybe it might be considered fraud.'

'As a matter of fact,' said Moore, 'with something like this, I don't know if any private company ought to own it. We ought to check with some government agency. If there's money in it--'

But Brandon was pounding both fists on his knees. To hell with the money, Warren. I mean, I'll take any money that comes my way but that's not the important thing. We're going to be famous, man, famous! Imagine the story. A fabulous treasure lost in space. A giant corporation combing space for twenty years to find it and all the time we, the forgotten ones, have it in our possession. Then, on the twentieth anniversary of the original loss, we find it again.

If this thing works, if anoptics becomes a great new scientific technique, they'll never forget us.'

Moore grinned, then started laughing. That's right. You did it, Mark. You did just what you set out to do. You've rescued us from being marooned in oblivion.'

'We all did it,' said Brandon. 'Mike Shea started us off with the necessary basic information. I worked out the theory, and you had the instrument.'

'Okay. It's late, and the wife will be back soon, so let's get the ball rolling right away. Multivac will tell us which agency would be appropriate and who--'

'No, no,' said Brandon. 'Ritual first. The closing toast of the anniversary the appropriate change. Won't you oblige Warren ?' He passed over the still half-full bottle of Jabra Water.

Carefully, Moore filled each small glass precisely to the brim. 'Gentlemen,' he said solemnly, 'a toast.' The three raised the glasses in unison. 'Gentlemen, I give you the Silver Queen souvenirs we used to have.'

Foreword.

I am ashamed to say that the idea for this story occurred to me when I read the obituary of a fellow science fiction writer in the New York Times and began to wonder whether my own obituary, when it came, would be as long. From that to this story was but a tiny little step.

Obituary.

My husband, Lancelot, always reads the paper at breakfast. What I see of him when he first appears is his lean, abstracted face, carrying its perpetual look of angry and slightly puzzled frustration. He doesn't greet me, and the newspaper, carefully unfolded in readiness for him, goes up before his face.

Thereafter, there is only his arm, emerging from behind the paper for a second cup of coffee into which I have carefully placed the necessary level teaspoonful of sugar- neither heaping nor deficient under pain of a stinging glare.

I am no longer sorry for this. It makes for a quiet meal, at least.

However, on this morning the quiet was broken when Lancelot barked out abruptly, 'Good Lord! That fool Paul Farber is dead. Stroke!'

I just barely recognized the name. Lancelot had mentioned him on occasion, so I knew him as a colleague, as another theoretical physicist. From my husband's exasperated epithet, I felt reasonably sure he was a moderately famous one who had achieved the success that had eluded Lancelot.