tsider 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 mere