The moon blew up while he was attending a fund-raising reception in the courtyard of the Caltech Athenaeum. At the beginning of the evening it was a fiercely cold bluish-white disk rising above the Chino Hills. Lay observers would fancy it a good night for moon watching, at least by Southern California standards, but Dr. Harris’s professional eye saw a thin border of fuzz around its rim and knew that aiming a telescope at it would be pointless. At least if the objective were to do science. Public relations was another matter; operating more in his Doc Dubois persona, he occasionally organized star parties where amateur astronomers would set their telescopes up in Eaton Canyon Park and aim them at crowd-pleasing targets such as the moon, the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter. Tonight would be a fine night for that.