cted wisely." He backed to the door,
opened it, and closed it behind him.

Rick's eyes met Scotty's across the room, and both grinned widely, but
they said nothing in case the stranger had lingered outside the door.
Not until a few moments had passed and Rick had checked the hallway did
he speak.

"Well," he said happily, "one orphan kitten has found a happy home!"

CHAPTER X

The Great Pyramid

Parnell Winston faced the group of Egyptian scientists in the crowded
radio-telescope control room. Rick and Scotty waited impatiently for the
scientist to begin. They knew something important was coming up, from
remarks dropped by Winston earlier, but they didn't know what.

"Gentlemen," Winston began, "I and my young associates came at Dr.
Kerama's request because of the assumption that internal or local
difficulties had caused the strange peaks in your Sanborn tracings of
the first tryouts of the new system. The assumption was a natural and
logical one. However, we have demonstrated that it isn't true. The
system is working so perfectly that I must congratulate you. It is
seldom that anything so complex functions as well in the early stages."

Winston paused thoughtfully. "Of course Dr. Kerama realized that it
would be highly unusual to have internal circuit trouble cause such
signals. But what we have left, after eliminating the possibilities of
both internal and local interference, is something even more unusual. In
fact, it is fantastic."

Rick moved forward a little. He didn't want to miss any of this, because
he knew Winston, and he had never before seen the scientist so excited.

"What we have is a source of neutral hydrogen out in space, over five
thousand light years away from earth. This source is moving at such
incredible velocity that it is very close to the speed of light."

There was a stunned silence in the room. Rick considered the
implications of Winston's statement. The scientist had spent hours with
Kerama and Farid going over the Sanborn tracings, checking the location
of the source as shown by the big telescope's position. The change in
the source's position, from the time of first discovery to yesterday's
checking of the system, had given enough data to calculate its velocity
with reasonable accuracy.

The big unknown was the precise distance of the source. Readings from a
single position could not give distance with high accuracy, so the
scientists weren't sure of their figures--yet.