“Let’s have a look at how you’re saving it, then. I just found this on your computer,” Fitzroy said as he brought a hand out from behind his back. He held a printout of a photograph, an overhead shot of a group of people looking upward excitedly. They were recognizably the crew from this very control room, Ringier in their midst, along with three women in sexy poses who might have been the girlfriends of some in the group. The location of the photo was evidently the roof of the control room building, and the photo was very clear, as if it had been shot from ten or twenty meters above. Where it differed from an ordinary photograph was in the complicated numbers overlaid atop it. “Doctor, you’re standing on the highest point of the building. It doesn’t have a rocker arm like a movie set, does it? You’re telling me that rotating Hubble II thirty degrees costs money. Well, how much does it cost to rotate it three hundred sixty degrees? Besides, that ten-million-dollar investment wasn’t made so you could snap photos of you and your girlfriends from space. Should I add that sum to your bill?”

“General, your order must of course be carried out,” Ringier said hastily, and the engineers immediately went to work.

Coordinate data was quickly called up from the target database. In space, the enormous cylinder, over twenty meters in diameter and more than a hundred meters long, slowly started to turn, panning across the starfield displayed on the screen in the control room.

“This is what the telescope sees?” asked the general.

“No, this is just the image returned by the positioning system. The telescope returns still photos that need to be processed before they’re viewable.”

Five minutes later, the panning stopped. The control system reported that positioning had been achieved, and after another five minutes, Ringier said, “Good. Now return to the test position.”

In surprise, Fitzroy asked, “What? Is it done?”

“Yes. Now the images are being processed.”

“Can’t you take a few more?”

“General, we’ve captured two hundred ten images at multiple focal lengths.” At that moment the first observation image finished processing, and Ringier pointed to the screen. “Look, General. There’s the enemy world you want to see so badly.”

Fitzroy saw nothing but a group of three halos against a dark background. They were diffuse, like streetlights through fog. These were the three stars that would decide the fate of two civilizations.

“So we really can’t see the planet.” Fitzroy couldn’t hide his disappointment.

“Of course we can’t. Even when the hundred-meter Hubble III is finished, we’ll only be able to observe Trisolaris at a very few set positions, and we’ll only be able to make it out as a dot, with no detail at all.”