He leaned forward and set his right eye close to the pinpoint of light
and looked outward. Was it--could it be--familiar. He changed his
angle of sight. Was Galactic North aligned with Terrestrial North?
Dusty could not remember. The center of the Galaxy? Somewhere in or
near Sagittarius, he believed, but Dusty was not familiar with the
constellation. There! Was that the Belt of Orion? It looked strange,
distorted. The constellation as he remembered it of old, was not like
that. Pinpoints, of course, could not begin to look like these tiny
discs, or vice versa. Was it this that made them seem unfamiliar or
was it that he was displaced in scalar space by enough light-years to
distort the constellation? Was that--there--Polaris and the Dippers,
large and small and Andromeda? Or, thought Dusty with wry self-disgust
creeping into his mind, was that _W_-shaped thing Cassiopeia? He wished
that he had paid more attention to astronomy.
Pleiades? He shook his head. That was a cluster and unless one
remembered very carefully the configuration as it looked from Sol, the
conglomeration of stars would probably look about the same from the
same number of light-years from the opposite side.
Sol--if that sprinkle of glow were Sol--must be near bright Sirius.
An inch away and a double star. And Alpha Centauri should lie about a
half inch from Sol and it should be a fine trinary; two bright ones in
a binary and a less bright one making the triple. And Procyon--or was
that only a single like Sol? He ran through his sorry list of stars
remembered as being within fifteen or sixteen light-years of Sol, and
was appalled to see the number of pinpoints that were surrounded by
that tiny sphere that represented the sixteen light-year diameter. His
mental catalogue had holes in the listings--more hole than listing, he
considered truthfully.
* * * * *
Confused thoughts and vague remembrances plagued him. Wearily Dusty
shook his head. For here, up close to the sprinkles themselves, he
knew that they were not scaled. How could the scale show a binary when
the size of the stars was scaled at a half light-year in diameter?
If that bright one were Sirius as he supposed, it was a single blob
because Sirius and its companion were quite lost in the half light-year
diameter of the glowing spot that represented the system. And so, of
course, was Centauri. No, one could not scale a hundred-thousand
light-years down to a thousand feet and hope to retain enough detail to
calculate a course.
He nodded unhappily and looked along the green-yellow line that ended
at Sol and realized that at least at one place in the course there was
a change of direction that was so shallow that the diameter of the line
representing the course was so wide that the ship, in actuality, only
traversed space from one side of the line to the other, changed course,
and returned to the first side.
Dusty leaned forward again, looking along the yellow-greenish line
that marked the Transgalactic course. At the far end he noted the
wink ... wink ... wink of the star-beacon, not much different than it
had appeared in Scyth Radnor's spacecraft. "Where," he asked, "does
their course lead from Sol?"
"The prospectus, of course, is not shown as finished," said Gant. "But
we can show it momentarily." He pressed a button and a dotted line of
yellow-green flashed into view, extending from the end of the solid
line out and out until it was lost to their view through the star-field
toward the outward Spiral Cluster.
Dusty looked at the line. "I suppose it isn't to scale or anything,"
he said. "But I can't help hoping--Gant, look, suppose this model were
truly to scale, couldn't they save themselves a beacon here?"
"Save a beacon?"
Dusty nodded and the little spreckles blinked at his eyes. Gant shook
his head. "This model was built in the hope that we could play gods
standing in our galaxy with a measuring stick. We failed because we are
no nearer to the stature of gods than this model is to the stature of
the galaxy itself. We cannot play gods, Dusty Britton."
"I'm not trying to play God," said Dusty solemnly. "I'm just thinking
that if you can move a planet away from a star you want to convert
into a three-day variable, you might be able to take your barytrine
field and slap it around this star here," Dusty pointed to one with
a forefinger, "Then you move it aside and that gives you a long
run from this beacon to that beacon--missing Sol by a full inch,
or--eight-and-a-third light-years."
Gant blinked. Slowly, he said, "Move the star--" and let his voice
trail away into a mutter. "Move the interfering star--" he repeated
again. "Then--my Lord!"
"What's the matter?" asked Dusty.
"Yours is the glimmer of an idea that makes for the birth of a new
concept!" breathed Gant. "Take it from there, Dusty. Don't you see?
Move a star and straighten out one dogleg, move two and iron out the
course even more. Maybe we could drill a free channel completely
through from Marandis to the Spiral Cluster. Maybe from Marandis to
Star's End, to Vannevarre, to Rescrustes--perhaps from Laranonne to
Ultimane across the whole galaxy, a hundred thousand light-years of
free flight without a change in course. I--"
A tiny spot of light came crawling along the yellow-green course to
disappear into the tiny pinpoint of light that represented Sol.
Gant said, "That must have been Transgalactic, returning to Sol to--"
then Gant jumped. "Dusty! Come on! There's no time to waste!"
He hit the buttons on the control panel viciously and the little flying
catwalk swung noiselessly back across thousands of light-years of
scaled distance to fit into its niche once more. The circular catwalk
rose high above the wispy model to its former position.