Morning sunlight streamed in through the big, cathedral windows. Twenty mental retards were at play on the smooth, polished floor. Some were laying wood blocks end to end. I watched one, a bald mid-dle-aged imbecile with tufts of gray hair sprouting just above his ear-lobes, and thought that, given a perpetual supply of those faceless cubes, he would lay them from here to the end of the universe and back, forming a great, perfect ellipse. His concentration was complete, his determination unshakable. Each day he performed the same ritual--or was it actually an infantile experiment? Only the attendant, a bruiser well over six feet, could break his fascination, and not without a fight.
  It was mid-morning. Playtime would continue for another hour. I looked out through the clear polysilicate wall. It was full spring on Earth. When I last left my home planet, it was deep in the grip of a northern winter, the capital of the New Worlds Confederacy blanketed beneath ten inches of snow. The big outer-planet shuttles were being diverted to landing fields further south. The President was vacationing in Jamaica.
  Since my return I had spent a good part of my time watching the small buds of a sycamore tree slowly open. Imprisoned as I was, I became a connoisseur of the crocus and the hyacinth. What else could I do? Branded as mentally defective by a government I had spent ten years serving--for the most part in capacities such as Waste Control Inspector for the Jovan moon system--now I was condemned to spend the rest of my days in a state hospital. Was this the thanks I got for my long years of service, not to mention the final, nearly fatal mission that ultimately landed me in this sorry mess?
  As I scanned a clump of lilacs near the small park adjoining the hospi-tal grounds, I realized what a mistake I had made in reporting my fate-ful discovery directly to a politician. I should have gone first to my immediate superior in the Division for Colonial Affairs, let him spring it on his own boss, and him on his, until word reached the President through ordinary official channels. That way I would have spared my-self the humiliation of being diagnosed a fool (how could I know my speech would sound like gobbledygook after several days of hyper-photic travel?) and perhaps have saved the solar system as well from a cataclysmic fate. The President might be able to silence one junior-grade civil servant, but he could hardly keep under wraps a piece of news an entire governmental department had been exposed to. Marshall Lynch had been a boyhood hero of mine, along with millions of other youths. He was also my ultimate superior as President of the New Worlds Confederacy. I would have laughed at, then probably slugged, anyone who maligned the man, until the day he had me thrown into this booby hatch for telling him that the end of the world, our entire solar system, was at hand.
  The gray-haired moron had reached the wall and was beginning a sec-ond line of blocks, keeping them strictly parallel with the first. Drool had accumulated on his bottom lip. His baggy pants were half off. He looked like any two-year-old cutting a back molar. Only the regularity of the lines he was constructing suggested a more mature, however twisted, intelligence.
  He never invited me to join his game. But he seemed to know I took a special interest in it. When his daily project approached my usual post near the window, his eye would catch my own and a flicker of some-thing--was it cunning?--came alive there. In his childish mind perhaps he saw me as an accomplice. He might even be hoping to make me his playmate, as others had tried to do when I was first placed on the ward. A gang of retarded adults can be every bit as impetuous as the infants they emulate. It was boredom with my unfertile adult imagination that finally caused them to leave me in peace. If I had had to defend myself from their collective will, I would have been mincemeat by now.
  I sized him up for a possible confrontation. Unlike most of his mental contemporaries, he was a lightweight. I could take him with one hand behind my back. 
  His line, until now strictly parallel to the one already stretching from one end of the ward to the other, veered off radically as it came near where I was standing. He added more blocks in a seemingly haphazard way, causing the line to zig and zag. I watched, wondering if something in his brain had gone haywire. 
  The pattern now stretched almost to the window. For a moment I thought he would continue on until the thick polysilicate wall stopped him. But then the line of blocks abruptly came to a halt and, after a quick furtive look over his shoulder he returned to the middle of the pattern. Hurriedly, he extended the lines between two points of the zig-zag, forming an imperfect parallelogram. Then he added several blocks to one corner of the figure, making a small triangle.
  If you mentally erased the blocks between the points of the pattern, the figure looked like a molecular diagram or even a constellation. First I tried to fit it into the shape of an atomic structure. It came close to the configuration of some carbonates I once had to sketch for a chemistry class, but it was too loose a pattern to make anything definite out of it.
  Next I matched it with the constellations visible from the northern hemisphere. Here I was on more familiar territory. I was no astrono-mer, but any spacedog knows the constellations. Stars are to him what channels and sandbars are to a river pilot. I started with Ursa Major and worked my way south. None of them quite fit.
  I continued across the ecliptic into the southern hemisphere. The game was getting tedious. I didn't really expect to find a set of stars to match the imbecile's block figure. Still, did I have anything better to do? Sadly, this was the best mental stimulation I had had for several days.
  I worked my way to the Southern Cross without success. I was run-ning out of stars. It was almost snack time and, childish as it seemed, I looked forward to my cookies and milk as much as any of my impaired brethren. But thanks to my long years of academic training, I was also determined to solve the conundrum on the floor in front of me. I passed quickly through Libra and Scorpius, heading towards Ophiuchus at the very tip of the southern hemisphere.  Then something made me pause and retrace my route in the direction of the Southern Cross. Was I mis-taken, or did that lopsided parallelogram and the triangular cluster of blocks at one of its points look like...?