r 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 ou