Fell in love with the lovely houses, and the darling trees in summer
bloom. With the parterres of twinkling star-flowers and the expanses of
verdant lawns. With the trellised green roses that tapestried every
porch. With the hydrangealike blooms that garnished every corner. With
Pfleugersville itself.
Obviously the hour was late, for, other than himself, there was no one
on the streets, although lights burned in the windows of some of the
houses, and dogs of the same breed and size as Zarathustra occasionally
trotted by. And yet according to his watch the time was 10:51. Maybe,
though, Pfleugersville was on different time. Maybe, here in
Pfleugersville, it was the middle of the night.
The farther he progressed into the village, the more enchanted he
became. He simply couldn't get over the houses. The difference between
them and the houses he was familiar with was subtle, but it was there.
It was the difference that exists between good- and not-quite-good
taste. Here were no standardized patios, but little marble aprons that
were as much a part of the over-all architecture as a glen is a part of
a woods. Here were no stereotyped picture windows, but walls that
blended imperceptibly into pleasing patterns of transparency. Here were
no four-square back yards, but rambling star-flowered playgrounds with
swings and seesaws and shaded swimming holes; with exquisite doghouses
good enough for little girls' dolls to live in.
He passed a school that seemed to grow out of the very ground it stood
on. He passed a library that had been built around a huge tree, the
branches of which had intertwined their foliage into a living roof. He
passed a block-long supermarket built of tinted glass. Finally he came
to the park.
He gasped then. Gasped at the delicate trees and the little blue-eyed
lakes; at the fairy-fountains and the winding, pebbled paths.
Star-flowers shed their multicolored radiance everywhere, and starlight
poured prodigally down from the sky. He chose a path at random and
walked 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 youth
gazing steadfastly up into the heavens. In one hand the youth held a
Phillips screw driver, in the other a six-inch crescent wrench. Standing
several yards away and staring raptly up into the statue's face was the
youth himself, and so immobile was he that if it hadn't been for the
pedestal on which the statue rested, Philip would have been unable to
distinguish one from the other.
There was an inscription on the pedestal. He walked over and read it in
the 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 was
looking in his direction. "Me," the flesh-and-blood Francis Pfleuger
said, pointing proudly at the statue. "Me."
"So I gather," Philip said dryly. And then. "Zarathustra--come back
here!"
The little dog had started down one of the paths that converged on the
statue. At Philip's command, he stopped but did not turn; instead he
remained where he was, as though waiting for someone to come down the
path. After a moment, someone did--Judith Darrow.
She was wearing a simple white dress, reminiscent both in design and
decor of a Grecian tunic. A wide gilt belt augmented the effect, and her
delicate sandals did nothing to mar it. In the radiance of the
star-flowers, her eyes were more gray than green. There were shadows
under 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 the
back seat of my car."
"Thank you. I've been looking all over Pfleugersville for him. I left my
Valleyview doors open, hoping he'd come home of his own accord, but I
guess 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 you
seem to think it is."
"Don't you?" she asked. "Then suppose you show me the full moon that
rose over Valleyview tonight. Or better yet, suppose I show you
something else." She pointed to a region of the heavens just to the left
of the statue's turned-up nose. "You can't see them from here," she
said, "but around that insignificant yellow star, nine planets are in
orbit. 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, distance
is not a factor. In Moebius space--as we have come to call it for lack
of a better term--any two given points are coincidental, regardless of
how far apart they may be in non-Moebius space. But this becomes manifest
only when a Moebius coincidence-field is established. As you probably
know by now, Francis Pfleuger created such a field."
At the mention of his name, Francis Pfleuger came hurrying over to where
they 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 up
the rear. Behind them, Francis returned to his Narcissistic study of
himself in stone. "We were neighbors back in Valleyview," Judith said,
"but I never dreamed he thought quite so much of himself. Ever since we
put 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 an
attempt to justify his new status in life, but he hasn't the remotest
notion of what it means. It's ironic in a way that Pfleugersville should
have 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 of
field you were talking about."
"He didn't create it deliberately--he brought it into being accidentally
by means of a machine he was building to tie knots with. Or at least
that's what he says. But we do know that there was such a machine
because we saw its fused parts in his kitchen, and there's no question
but what it was the source of the field. Francis, though, can't remember
how 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 a
feeling 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 to
divulge our secret to an outsider unless he was first accepted by the
group as a whole," she said. "But thanks to my negligence, you know most
of it already, so I suppose you're entitled to know the rest." She
sighed. "Very well--I'll try to explain...."
When Francis Pfleuger's field had come into being, something had
happened to the back doors of Valleyview that caused them to open upon a
planet which one of the local star-gazers promptly identified as Sirius
XXI. The good folk of Valleyview had no idea of how such a state of
affairs 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 the
plan which they presently devised to make their forthcoming utopia
self-sufficient, came up with a theory that explained everything.
According to his theory, the round-trip distance between any two
planetary or squaredstella bodies was curved in the manner of a Moebius
strip--i.e., a strip of paper given a half-twist before bringing the two
ends together. In this case, the strip represented the round-trip
distance from Earth to Sirius XXI. Earth was represented on the strip by
one dot, and Sirius XXI by another, and, quite naturally, the two dots
were an equal distance--or approximately 8.8 light years--apart. This
brought them directly opposite one another--one on one side of the
strip, the other on the other side; but since a Moebius strip has only
one surface--or side--the two dots were actually occupying the same
space at the same time. In "Moebius space", then, Earth and Sirius XXI
were "coincidental".
* * * * *
Philip looked over his shoulder at the little yellow sun twinkling in
the sky. "Common sense," he said, "tells me differently."
"Common sense is a liar of the first magnitude," Judith said. "It has
misled man ever since he first climbed down from the trees. It was
common sense that inspired Ptolemy's theory of cosmogony. It was common
sense that inspired the burning of Giordano Bruno...."
The fact that common sense indicated that 8.8 light years separated
Earth and Sirius XXI in common-sense reality didn't prove that 8.8 light
years separated them in a form of reality that was outside
common-sense's dominion--i.e., Moebius space--and Francis Pfleuger's
field had demonstrated as much. The back-door nodal areas which it had
established, however, were merely limited manifestations of that
reality--in other words, the field had merely provided limited access to
a form of space that had been in existence all along.
"Though why," Judith concluded, "our back doors should have been
affected rather than our front doors, for example, is
inexplicable--unless it was because Francis built the machine in his
kitchen. In any event, when they did become nodal areas, they manifested
themselves on Sirius XXI, and the dogs in the immediate vicinity
associated them with the doorways of their departed masters and began
whining to be let in."
"Their departed masters?"
"The race that built this village. The race that built the factories and
developed the encompassing farms. A year ago, according to the records
they left behind them, they migrated to the Greater Magellanic Cloud."