“But there’s something else here, Doctor. What do you think this is?” asked one of the engineers, pointing to a spot close to the three halos.

Fitzroy leaned in but saw nothing. It was so faint that only an expert could catch it.

“It’s got a diameter larger than a star,” an engineer said.

After enlarging the area several times, the thing covered the entire screen.

“It’s a brush!” shouted the general in alarm.

The layman always comes up with better names than the expert, which is why when experts name things they, too, work from an outsider’s perspective. And thus “brush” became the figure’s name, because the general’s description was accurate: It was a cosmic brush. Or, to be more precise, a set of cosmic bristles without a handle. Of course, you could also see it as hair standing on end.

“It must be a scratch in the coating! I mentioned in the feasibility study that a paste-up lens would cause problems,” Ringier said, shaking his head.

“All the coatings have been through stringent testing. A scratch of this sort wouldn’t happen. And it’s not generated by any other lens flaw, either. We’ve already returned tens of thousands of test images, and it’s never come up before,” said an expert from Zeiss, the lens’s manufacturer.

A hush fell over the control room. They all gathered to stare up at the image on the screen until it got so crowded that some of them called up the image on other terminals. Fitzroy sensed the change in the room’s atmosphere: People who had grown lazy from the fatigue of lengthy tests were anxious now, like they had been hit by a curse that rooted everything in place but their eyes, which grew ever brighter.

“God!” exclaimed several people at the same time.

The frozen formation abruptly turned into excited activity. The snatches of dialogue Fitzroy picked up were a bit too technical for him.

“Any dust around the target’s position? Check it—”

“No need. I completed that item. Observing the absorption of the background stellar radial movement, there’s an absorption peak at two hundred millimeters. It may be a carbon microparticle, F-class density.”

“Any opinions on the effect of high-speed impact?”

“The wake diffuses along the impact axis, but the diffusion scope … Do we have a model of that?”

“Yes. One moment.… Here it is. Impact speed?”

“A hundred times third cosmic velocity.”

“Is it already that high?”

“That’s a conservative figure.… For the impact cross section, use … Right, that’s right. That’s just about it. Just a rough estimate.”

With the experts busy, Ringier stood next to Fitzroy. “General, can you try your best to count the bristles in the brush?”

The general nodded, and then bent over a terminal and began counting.