“Well?”

Paul wove the tires around a tiny scatter of gravel. Then he began. “Well, ordinarily, star photos don’t get seen around for years, if ever, but the astro boys on the Project have a standing request out with their pals at the observatories to be shown anything unusual. We’ve even had star pix the day after they were taken.”

Margo laughed. “Late Sports Final of the Stellar Atlas?”

“Exactly! Well, the first photo came in a week ago. It showed a starfield with the planet Pluto in it. But something had happened during the exposure so that the stars around Pluto had blanked out or shifted position. I got to look at it myself — there were three very faint squiggles where the brightest stars near Pluto had shifted. Black-on-white squiggles — in real astronomy you just look at the negatives.”

“Inside stuff,” Margo said solemnly. Then, “Paul!” she cried. “There was a newspaper story this morning about a man who claimed to have seen some stars twirl! I remember the headline: STARS MOVED, SAYS WRONG-WAY DRIVER.”

“I saw it too,” Paul said a bit sourly. “He was driving an open-top car at the time, and had an accident — because he was so fascinated by the stars, he said. Turned out he’d been drinking.”

“Yes, but the people with him in the car backed him up. And later there were phone calls to the planetarium, reporting the same thing.”

“I know, we had some at the Moon Project,” Paul said. “Just the usual business of mass suggestion. Look, Margo, the photo I was telling you about was taken a week ago, and it was of something only a powerful telescope could see. Let’s not get it mixed up with flying saucer-type nonsense. I’m saying, we got a photo of Pluto showing three faint star-squiggles. But get this — Pluto hadn’t shifted at all! Its image was a black dot”

“What’s so astonishing about that?”

“Ordinarily you don’t get startled at starlight or even star images wavering. Earth’s atmosphere does it, same as it makes hills waver on a hot day — in fact, that’s what makes the stars twinkle. But in this case, whatever was twisting the starlight had to be out beyond Pluto. This side of the stars, but beyond Pluto.”