"From my staff?'

"From wherever you can get it. That's the other half of my recommendation. If I were you, I would go to the crackpots."

Wagoner waited. Corsi said these things for effect; he liked drama in small doses. He would explain in a moment.

"Of course I don't mean total crackpots," Corsi said. "But you'll have to draw the line yourself. You need marginal contributors, scientists of good reputation generally whose obsessions don't strike fire with other members of their profession. Like the Crehore atom, or old Ehrenhaft's theory of magnetic currents, or the Milne cosmology you'll have to find the fruitful one yourself. Look for discards, and then find out whether or not the idea deserved to be totally discarded. And don't accept the first 'expert' opinion that you get."

"Winnow chaff, in other words."

"What else is there to winnow?" Corsi said. "Of course it's a long chance, but you can't turn to scientists of real stature now; it's too late for that. Now you'll have to use sports, freaks, near misses."

"Starting where?"

"Oh," said Corsi, "how about gravity? I don't know any other subject that's attracted a greater quota of idiot speculations. Yet the acceptable theories of what gravity is are of no practical use to us. They can't be put to work to help lift a spaceship. We can't manipulate gravity as a field; we don't even have a set of equations for it that we can agree upon. No more will we find such a set by spending fortunes and decades on the project. The law of diminishing returns has washed that approach out."

Wagoner got up. "You don't leave me much," he said glumly.

"No," Corsi agreed. "I leave you only what you started with. That's more than most of us are left with, Bliss."

Wagoner grinned tightly at him and the two men shook hands. As Wagoner left, he saw Corsi silhouetted against the fire, his back to the door, his shoulders bent. While he stood there, a shot blatted not far away, and the echoes bounded back from the face of the embassy across the street. It was not a common sound in Washington, but neither was it unusual: it was almost surely one of the city's thousands of anonymous snoopers firing at a counteragent, a cop, or a shadow.

Corsi made no responding movement. The senator closed the door quietly.

He was shadowed all the way back to his own apartment, but this time he hardly noticed. He was thinking about an immortal man who flew from star to Star faster than light.

CHAPTER ONE New York

In the newer media of communication ... the popularization of science is confounded by rituals of mass entertainment. One standard routine dramatizes science through the biography of a hero scientist: at the denouement, lie is discovered in a lonely laboratory crying 'Eureka' at a murky test tube held up to a bare light bulb.

GERARD PIEL

THE PARADE of celebrities, notorieties, and just plain brass that passed through the reception. room of Jno. Pfitzner & Sons was marvelous to behold. During the hour and a half that Colonel Paige Russell had been cooling his heels, he had identified the following publicity saints: Senator Bliss Wagoner (Dem., Alaska) chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Space Flight; Dr. Guiseppi Corsi, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a former Director of the World Health Organization; and Francis Xavier MacHinery, hereditary head of the FBI.