was subtle, but it was there.It was the difference that exists between good- and not-quite-goodtaste. Here were no standardized patios, but little marble aprons thatwere as much a part of the over-all architecture as a glen is a part ofa woods. Here were no stereotyped picture windows, but walls thatblended imperceptibly into pleasing patterns of transparency. Here wereno four-square back yards, but rambling star-flowered playgrounds withswings and seesaws and shaded swimming holes; with exquisite doghousesgood enough for little girls' dolls to live in.
He passed a school that seemed to grow out of the very ground it stoodon. He passed a library that had been built around a huge tree, thebranches of which had intertwined their foliage into a living roof. Hepassed a block-long supermarket built of tinted glass. Finally he cameto the park.
He gasped then. Gasped at the delicate trees and the little blue-eyedlakes; at the fairy-fountains and the winding, pebbled paths.Star-flowers shed their multicolored radiance everywhere, and starlightpoured prodigally down from the sky. He chose a path at random andwalked along it in the twofold radiance till he came to the cynosure.
The cynosure was a statue--a statue of a buck-toothed, wall-eyed youthgazing steadfastly up into the heavens. In one hand the youth held aPhillips screw driver, in the other a six-inch crescent wrench. Standingseveral yards away and staring raptly up into the statue's face was theyouth himself, and so immobile was he that if it hadn't been for thepedestal on which the statue rested, Philip would have been unable todistinguish one from the other.
There was an inscription on the pedestal. He walked over and read it inthe light cast by a nearby parterre of star-flowers:
FRANCIS FARNSWORTH PFLEUGER, DISCOVERER OF PFLEUGERSVILLE
_Born: May 5. 1941. Died: ----_
_Profession Inventor. On the first day of April of the year of our Lord, 1962, Francis Farnsworth Pfleuger brought into being a Moebius coincidence field and established multiple contact with the twenty-first satellite of the star Sirius, thereby giving the people of Valleyview access, via their back doorways, to a New World. Here we have come to live. Here we have come to raise our children. Here, in this idyllic village, which the noble race that once inhabited this fair planet left behind them when they migrated to the Greater Magellanic Cloud, we have settled down to create a new and better Way of Life. Here, thanks to Francis Farnsworth Pfleuger, we shall know happiness prosperity and freedom from fear._
FRANCIS FARNSWORTH PFLEUGER, WE, THE NEW INHABITANTS OF SIRIUS XXI, SALUTE YOU!
Philip wiped his forehead again.
Presently he noticed that the flesh-and-blood Francis Pfleuger waslooking in his direction. "Me," the flesh-and-blood Francis Pfleugersaid, pointing proudly at the statue. "Me."
"So I gather," Philip said dryly. And then. "Zarathustra--come backhere!"
The little dog had started down one of the paths that converged on thestatue. At Philip's command, he stopped but did not turn; instead heremained where he was, as though waiting for someone to come down thepath. After a moment, someone did--Judith Darrow.
She was wearing a simple white dress, reminiscent both in design anddecor of a Grecian tunic. A wide gilt belt augmented the effect, and herdelicate sandals did nothing to mar it. In the radiance of thestar-flowers, her eyes were more gray than green. There were shadowsunder them, Philip noticed, and the lids were faintly red.
She halted a few feet from him and looked at him without saying a word."I ... I brought your dog back," he said lamely. "I found him in theback seat of my car."
"Thank you. I've been looking all over Pfleugersville for him. I left myValleyview doors open, hoping he'd come home of his own accord, but Iguess he had other ideas. Now that you've discovered our secret, Mr.Myles, what do you think of our brave new world?"
"I think it's lovely," Philip said, "but I don't believe it's where youseem to think it is."
"Don't you?" she asked. "Then suppose you show me the full moon thatrose over Valleyview tonight. Or better yet, suppose I show yousomething else." She pointed to a region of the heavens just to the leftof the statue's turned-up nose. "You can't see them from here," shesaid, "but around that insignificant yellow star, nine planets are inorbit. One of them is Earth."
"But that's impossible!" he objected. "Consider the--"
"Distance? In the sort of space we're dealing with, Mr. Myles, distanceis not a factor. In Moebius space--as we have come to call it for lackof a better term--any two given points are coincidental, regardless ofhow far apart they may be in non-Moebius space. But this becomes manifestonly when a Moebius coincidence-field is established. As you probablyknow by now, Francis Pfleuger created such a field."
At the mention of his name, Francis Pfleuger came hurrying over to wherethey were standing. "E," he declared, "equals mc squared."
"Thank you, Francis," Judith said. Then, to Philip, "Shall we walk?"
They started down one of the converging paths, Zarathustra bringing upthe rear. Behind them, Francis returned to his Narcissistic study ofhimself in stone. "We were neighbors back in Valleyview," Judith said,"but I never dreamed he thought quite so much of himself. Ever since weput up that statue last week, he's been staring at it night and day.Sometimes he even brings his lunch with him."
"He seems to be familiar with Einstein."
"He's not really, though. He memorized the energy-mass equation in anattempt to justify his new status in life, but he hasn't the remotestnotion of what it means. It's ironic in a way that Pfleugersville shouldhave been discovered by someone with an IQ of less than seventy-five."
"No one with an IQ of less than seventy-five could create the sort offield you were talking about."
"He didn't create it deliberately--he brought it into being accidentallyby means of a machine he was building to tie knots with. Or at leastthat's what he says. But we do know that there was such a machinebecause we saw its fused parts in his kitchen, and there's no questionbut what it was the source of the field. Francis, though, can't rememberhow he made the parts or how he put them together. As a matter of fact,to this day he still doesn't understand what happened--though I have afeeling that he knows more than he lets on."
"What _did_ happen?" Philip asked.
For a while Judith was silent. Then, "All of us promised solemnly not todivulge our secret to an outsider unless he was first accepted by thegroup as a whole," she said. "But thanks to my negligence, you know mostof it already, so I suppose you're entitled to know the rest." Shesighed. "Very well--I'll try to explain...."
When Francis Pfleuger's field had come into being, something hadhappened to the back doors of Valleyview that caused them to open upon aplanet which one of the local star-gazers promptly identified as SiriusXXI. The good folk of Valleyview had no idea of how such a state ofaffairs could exist, to say nothing of how it could have come about,till one of the scientists whom they asked to join them as a part of theplan which they presently devised to make their forthcoming utopiaself-sufficient, came up with a theory that explained everything.
According to his theory, the round-trip distance between any twoplanetary or squaredstella bodies was curved in the manner of a Moebiusstrip--i.e., a strip of paper given a half-twist before bringing the twoends together. In this case, the strip represented the round-tripdistance from Earth to Sirius XXI. Earth was represented on the strip byone dot, and Sirius XXI by another, and, quite naturally, the two dotswere an equal distance--or approximately 8.8 light years--apart. Thisbrought them directly opposite one another--one on one side of thestrip, the other on the other side; but since a Moebius strip has onlyone surface--or side--the two dots were actually occupying the samespace at the same time. In "Moebius space", then, Earth and Sirius XXIwere "coincidental".
* * * * *
Philip looked over his shoulder at the little yellow sun twinkling inthe sky. "Common sense," he said, "tells me differently."
"Common sense is a liar of the first magnitude," Jud
ith said. "It hasmisled man ever since he first climbed down from the trees. It wascommon sense that inspired Ptolemy's theory of cosmogony. It was commonsense that inspired the burning of Giordano Bruno...."
The fact that common sense indicated that 8.8 light years separatedEarth and Sirius XXI in common-sense reality didn't prove that 8.8 lightyears separated them in a form of reality that was outsidecommon-sense's dominion--i.e., Moebius space--and Francis Pfleuger'sfield had demonstrated as much. The back-door nodal areas which it hadestablished, however, were merely limited manifestations of thatreality--in other words, the field had merely provided limited