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"This planet Martin picked out is all wet, literally. The visibility is fine very few clouds but this whole half of it is solid ocean. If there are any islands, even, they're mighty small." All four looked into the receiver. With the great magnification employed, the planet almost filled the visiplate.
But, aside from the mechanical difficulties which arise when the lens is of the minute dimensions required for use with the microscope, other perplexities are introduced by the fact that the use of a wide pencil of light is a desideratum, in order to gain sufficient illumination when large magnification is to be secured.
It is never the dry clear light of noon. "She was a phantom of delight." "Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart, Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea, Pure as the naked heavens...." This idealization is often not so much a magnification of the object as a simplification of it. Confusing details are stripped away.
Course, lookout, and rank forgotten, the little crew of two stared into the narrow field of vision, set at its maximum magnification. The instruments showed that the enemy vessel was staying upon its original course. Very soon the torpedo came within range of the detectors of the hexans.
Now a skilled eye, aided by a pocket-lens, can make out very minute details on a cheque or bank-note; but it is not possible to lend one's skilled eye to a judge or juryman, so that it is often very convenient to be able to hand them a photograph in which the magnification is already done, which they can compare with the original.
Precisely the same materials, the same forces, the same methods, are employed in the little as in the big of these examples. Why should mere accumulation, reiteration, and magnification make the difference? We may ask why? But it does, for all that.
The sun shifted from the center of the screen, and a smaller reddish-green disc came into view a planet, its atmosphere coloring the light that left it toward the red. It rushed nearer, grew larger. Earth spread as it took the center of the screen. A world, a portion of a world, a continent, a fragment of a continent as the magnification increased, boundlessly it seemed.
It was visible now through the direct observation panel, without magnification. I left Clay in charge on the bridge, and I went down to the Com Section. Joyce sat at his board, reading instruments and keying controls. So he was back on the job. Mannion sat, head bent, monitoring his recorder. The room was filled with the keening staccato of the alien transmission. "Getting anything on video?"
But in order that the magnification may be effective, and serve to reveal what could not be seen without it, the image itself must be as nearly perfect as possible; this requires that every ray of light that forms the image shall be brought to a point in the image precisely corresponding to that from which it emanates in the real object.
If his personal ambitions and desires over-ruled other considerations, he never forgot the greatness of the country he ruled, and his personal ambitions at least involved England's magnification. For good or for evil, his actions were on a great scale. He knew his own mind, and he never shrank from the risks involved in giving his will effect.
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