Athor accepts the anomaly

Beenay, with Theremon's encouragement, presents his findings to Athor 77, the revered director of the Observatory. Athor, though initially shocked, does not reject the data. Instead, he invokes Thargola's Sword, the principle of parsimony, and proposes that an unknown factor—not a flaw in his theory—is responsible for the orbital perturbation. He begins working on a new hypothesis, rejuvenated by the intellectual challenge.