The old constellations. From our position out there in the moon shadow, they showed little distortion, and Ursula had simply noted them down, perhaps almost idly, as little dots of yellow and blue and red and white. But then she'd done more. Around the clusters she had sketched the old mythological figures, filling them in as her interest grew, supplying detail and emphasizing it with color until each sketch seemed almost alive.

  Old Orion seemed just ready to step off, his club held high, his lion's skin across his shoulder, and the short blade gleaming in his belt. Behind him prowled the Greater and Lesser Dogs, tongues lolling, eyes eager. One was a German shepherd and one was a Great Dane. Pegasus swept his great wings across more than his share of the canvas as he stretched out into what seemed to be a level run, nostrils flared, foam flying from his mouth. In spite of the wings, he wouldn't have been out of place at Churchill Downs.

  I chuckled as I skipped from figure to figure. They were clever, done with the technique only a great artist can command, but I couldn't see anything more. They were superficial. I enjoyed them, but that was all.

  I looked at Ursula, and her insistent gaze sent me back to the painting again. I was missing something. There sat Cassiopeia on her throne. Draco pushed his ugly head up toward where the northern bears hung with their ridiculous tails pointing to and away from the Pole Star. And then I got it. The Little Bear looked plump and contented, and Ursula had skillfully painted a honeycomb in his mouth. But old Ursa Major was unhappy. He was gaunt and thin. His lips writhed back from his fangs as though in pain. And no wonder! Out near the end of his long, unbearlike tail Ursula had painted a big, livid, and obviously uncomfortable knot.

  "I see it," I said. "Why?"

  "Don't know," Ursula said. "Just happened. Didn't look right any other way."

  I peered at the knot. Two visuals gleamed in the middle of the bruised and purple lump, one yellowish and one white.

  "Mizar and Alcor," I said. "Could be three visuals. A little magnification will bring out another one."

  "Know it. Put in another one. Didn't look right. Took it out."

  "It would scarcely be visible," I protested. "It couldn't make any real difference in the picture, could it?"

  "Did, though. Wasn't happy with it in."

  I have mentioned stepping out into Ursula's studio. That was literal. When we were in space, Ursula painted in a transparent bubble, a small, room-sized blister that could be extruded from the apparently featureless side of the Stardust. There, in radiation-shielded, air-conditioned comfort, Ursula interpreted the galaxy.

  From deep in the umbra of the moon, the constellations gleamed like on a summer night on Earth, but with far greater scope. The Great Bear literally hung before us. I picked up Ursula's binoculars, a 12x pair she had evidently been using to verify visuals. I focused on Mizar and Alcor, the region of the knot, the Horse and Rider of some mythology. The third visual came faintly into view, just as I remembered.

  "It's there," I said. "Hasn't changed a bit."

  "Know it," Ursula said. "Still can't put it in. Doesn't feel right."

  "And the knot?"

  "Belongs. Got to be. Don't know why."

  She looked at me for a moment, then suddenly turned back to her easel, her skinny fingers unerringly selecting the right brush from the collection thrust handle-end first into the large gray bun on the back of her head. It was dismissal. But as I slid back the door, she looked up briefly.

  "Think about it, Roscoe."

  She didn't have to say it. I was thinking.

  * * *

  There hadn't been one for all the time we had spent in the moon shadow; so when it came, it was overdue. After looking at Ursula's picture, though, I knew I had been expecting it.

  "Ladies and gentlemen!" The voice of Stony Price, communications chief, purred sedately out of our speakers. It was evident that he had been given a formal communique and told to stick with it. "Dr. Rasmussen requests the pleasure of the compnay of all senior and supervisory staff at dinner this evening. Appetizers at 1800. Be it known I've consulted the cook. It's a good menu!"

  The last, of course, was pure Stony Price. He never stuck to a script in his life.

  Johnny Rasmussen's dinners were a tradition aboard the Stardust. They all had the same format, the same formal lack of formality. That doesn't sound right. But it says what I want. And a dinner always meant more than it appeared to mean. It always preceded a crisis, or a big decision, or with the same deadpan gentility, it occasionally was a celebration. The raison d'etre was never mentioned. Attendance wasn't compulsory. But nobody missed Rasmussen's dinners. They were where big things happened.

  "I feel twitchy," Lindy said. "My radar is jumping. This dinner is going to be a weirdy!"

  She was selecting a dinner gown, of course. She was busy at that ten minutes after the communique came through.

  I knew what she meant. The dinner would be toothsome, as always, the company familiar and comfortable. It was the reason for it that she was talking about.

  She strolled back and forth between two creations she had hung on opposite sides of her dressing table. One was gray, a living, almost ominous gray, streaked through with long diagonal flashes of vivid blue. The other was like a flame hung on the wall. And that was the one she turned to, more and more often.

  No red-haired, green-eyed woman can wear a blazing red formal and get away with it. False. One can. She did, too; and with her curls piled high in a strange coiffure, a rope of milk pearls across the scenic splendor of her breasts, and a white orchid at her left shoulder, she looked like some barbaric princess on a world we'd just discovered. Actually, that's literary fudging. Since the Stardust first passed Pluto, we've found plenty of life, but none of it human or humanoid. Certainly nothing that remotely resembled Lindy.

  I seated her proudly, as I always do. The women all tried, and several of them looked pretty spectacular, but I had the queen and everybody knew it. And that's fair to good going for a guy who looks as rough as I do. Even a dinner jacket and a close shave can do only so much for a body like a storage tank, long, thick arms, pillar legs, and black hair showing everywhere hair can show except on the top of my head. Add a face that could have been chopped out with a dull hatchet—and you wonder about Lindy. It must be my beautiful eyes.

  Dr. Johannes Rasmussen made his entrance, on cue, exactly at 1800 hours. Tall, slender, tanned, immaculate, his moustaches waxed to points, he stood behind his chair and gazed with pleasure down the long table. Then, starting at his right, he named names:

  "Captain Griffin, Mr. Cheng, Miss Potts, Dr. Kissinger,"—on around the table. When he got back to himself he said, "I'm happy to have you here this evening. Won't you please be seated?" He could have done the whole bit in his sleep. And so could most of us.

  The men sat, and we all pitched in without ceremony. Utensils clinked. Conversation built from a polite murmur to a contented waterfall roar, punctuated occasionally by a deep laugh, or perhaps Lindy's high-pitched giggle.

  Next to me Ursula Potts dug into her baked fish like a hungry terrier. Ursula loves to eat as much as I do, which is no faint praise. Ursula's dinner dress was a sullen russet, with no ornamentation. Her skinny fingers were heavy with rings. But her wizened face and strange eyes were the same against any backdrop. She flicked those eyes up and down the table and chewed steadily. She wasn't missing a thing.

  "Good fish, Ursula," I said. "Must be Friday."

  She licked her thin lips.

  "Barbaric reference, Roscoe. No connection between food and the days of the week."

  "Not to me," I admitted. "I eat anything any day. But a lot of people still connect Friday and fish."

  "Day of mourning among the fish," Ursula said dryly. "Quit beating around the bush, Roscoe."

  "Okay." I shifted my tone. "What's this bash about, Ursula? Any premonitions? Better still, any information?"

  Ursula slurped her Chablis with appreciation.

  "Don't know. Can guess, though."

  "Give!"

  "We're going out."

  Rasmussen's seating seemed to confirm it. Cap'n Jules Griffin was on his right, and he wasn't there for his sparkling conversation. Cap'n Jules is the dullest man in space. I can't talk to him for five minutes. Usually he sits far down the table. But he's the genius who implements Ultraspan. He gets us where we want to go.

  And Moe Cheng sat next to him, a big-nosed, slant-eyed little man who knows more about the galaxy than any man has ever known. So it was logistics! But Ursula was next, and then I. We weren't there by accident either. Johnny never does anything at random.

  We ate, and Rasmussen exchanged polite amenities with those of us within range, like the correct, formal English gentleman he is. I did say English. Forget the name. In the nineteenth century he would have been one of the boys. To him, dinner wouldn't taste right if he weren't dressed for it. Dinner jacket. Black tie.

  * * *

  When the coffee arrived, big fragrant cups of it, and delicate shells of good brandy on the side, Johnny unwrapped the baby. Without seeming to do so, he raised his genteel voice, just enough so that the people at the far end of the table could hear him clearly.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, a brief but important announcement."

  He paused, and the talk died.

  "Miss Potts has painted a picture."

  Again that pause, but this time the silence was from astonishment.

  "Well, good for her!" Pegleg's sour voice was low, but it carried. "But that is Miss Potts's business, painting pictures. If Miss Potts had won the high jump, that might be news!"

  Rasmussen's eyes twinkled, but he kept the faith. He didn't smile.

  "This particular picture is important to all of us," he said. "On the basis of it I have made a decision. Dr. Kissinger, you have seen the picture. Would you describe it, please?"

  I was as out of it as anybody, but I can go along with a gag. "I suppose you mean the knot on the bear's tail," I said. "Proceed."

  So I went over the picture verbally and wound up with gaunt old Ursa Major, with his unhappy look and the painful lump on his caudal appendage. I played it straight, but people began to snicker. Everybody thought it was a yuk. For that matter, so did I. "I would prefer tangible data," the chief said, "but we don't have them. We tried everything we know. With the help of the Luna Reception Center—the Big Dish, if you will—we have monitored and analyzed and been frustrated by the sounds from space that Dr. Peterson has called the Music of the Spheres. It has been impossible to determine direction of origin."

  Johnny had curled his long fingers around his brandy glass, wanning it, and now he raised it, barely wetting his lips.

  "Miss Potts has sensed a disturbance in Ursa Major. She has even been specific as to location. Now we know that this is not evidence admissible anywhere in any scientific context. But most of us also know that Miss Potts has—shall we say—unique gifts." (What he meant was that the old witch was a witch!) "She has been a staff member on every flight of the Stardust, and I have never known her painted analyses to be entirely without foundation."

  A delicate sip of coffee, then more brandy. "I have therefore notified the International Space Council that the sounds appear to emanate from zeta Ursae Majoris, coloquially called Mizar, and have received clearance to proceed there to investigate."

  There wasn't even a murmur the entire length of the table. "The distance is eighty-eight light-years. Captain Griffin has assured me that we have the capacity to span it in seven stages. Mr. Cheng has plotted these stages. For seventy-two hours we will renew supplies at Tycho Base on Luna, during which time R. and R. leave will be granted to all personnel not involved in these activities. If any individual feels disinclined to make this voyage, he may separate without prejudice, and we will understand. That is a very angry-looking knot on the bear's tail!"

  He couldn't have bound them any closer to the ship if he had put chains on them. And well he knew it.

  He rose and stood tall, the brandy glass still in his hand.

  "It has been a pleasure to have you here this evening. There will be further refreshment in the main lounge, where the picture is on display for your examination. Good evening!"

  The old formula again. He didn't wait to take a bow, just slipped out the way he always does. And the press toward the lounge was faster than usual. If space people didn't have curiosity, they probably wouldn't be space people.

  * * *

  Well, that was the program, and that's the way it happened. The Stardust bestirred herself, swept out of the moon shadow in a long ellipse and into the bright unfiltered glare of Sol. Cap'n Jules took the scenic route, orbiting the moon once as we spiraled in to our spot at the Tycho docks.

  The landscape below us hadn't changed much. The dome clusters were few and far between. For the most part the long stretches of bleak, jumbled, cratered surface were just as three billion years had left them. I had been over them hundreds of times, but I still took a moment to stand straight and mentally salute two truly brave men in a tiny, flimsy, spider-legged craft who came safely to rest for the first time in that empty wilderness below. Countless messages have come to Earth from space since 1969, but none will ever again have the thrilling impact of the cheerful announcement:

  "The Eagle has landed!"

  But enough of reminiscence and history. The Stardust eased gently into her slip, her thousands of tons completely nullified by her new timonium antigravs. Cap'n Jules brought her in like a feather on a breeze. She lay full length, a vast metal sausage, blunt-nosed, blunt-sterned and featureless. No on-looker could have imagined the variety of handy little gadgets that could be extruded at need from her glistening hide, from jumper platforms to Ursula Potts's studio. Nor was there any hint of the full fifty openings that could be activated; personnel ports, cargo ports, great shutter-like openings that could each discharge a four-man scout-boat into space.

  The personnel ports were promptly put to use as all but a handful of our researchers and crew streamed into the pressurized corridors and out into the big-city attractions and fleshpots of Tycho Base. Pegleg and Lindy and I went along. I couldn't have cared less about Tycho's charms, but it did feel good to get my feet back on terra firma once again. I said as much.

  "Luna firma," Lindy corrected. "Terra is thataway." And so it was, hanging resplendent, high in the Lunar northern sky. The great central dome of Tycho arched over the sector of shops and hotels and entertainment places in one graceful, lofty sweep. It filtered out hard radiation and gave a soft, ghostlike quality to the sunlight it allowed to come through. And it changed the celestial view. We looked up at a luminous green Earth, and behind it the northern constellations were picked out in icy dots. The Great Bear was in view. For a moment I could almost see his gaunt, unhappy look, and the swelling knot on his long tail.

  We prowled the grass-bordered streets, looked into shop windows, sniffed at the doors of eating places. We sat on the benches in Tycho's famous Aldrin Park, where oaks and beeches and pines and dogwoods pretended, like the people, that they were still on Earth. A mockingbird sang from a holly tree near where we sat. Cardinals and bluebirds flashed as they flew. I wondered what effect the lessened gravity had on their flight. They seemed happy and normal.

  It was a pleasant little interlude. Pegleg left us on affairs of his own, which I suspected had to do with a slumberous-eyed, dark-haired little stewardess he knew on one of the shuttle runs to Earth. The nature of man changeth not. I felt smug, for I'd put all that behind me. Or, to put it more correctly, I liked my arrangement better.

  Lindy and I had dinner at the Earthview, not Tycho's biggest or grandest restaurant, but I knew from experience that you couldn't beat the food. And that's why I go to eating places. We had oysters Luna, a pale green soup that smelled like a breath of the jungle, reindeer steaks from Lapland, artichokes and spinach from Texas, and three kinds of wine. There were fruits from Malaya, a French dessert, and finally coffee and a heavenly clear liqueur, a specialty of the house. And all served by a blond goddess six feet tall and magnificently topless!

  "Eyes are for looking," Lindy said, "but don't neglect your food. Would you like to bet I couldn't take her job?"

  "Why," I asked reproachfully, "would you want to put a poor girl out of work? You already have a job. One that's yours as long as you want it, and when you don't want it any more, I'll close the position out for good. Now may I look?"

  Her green eyes danced. She reached across the little table to put a hand on mine.

  "Stare away," my wife said. "I don't see how it can hurt you."

  If you're thinking that this is irrelevant, that it's all digression, don't you believe it. That little touch of R. and R. was important. We needed the supplies they were loading into the Stardust, but no more than we needed that touch of solid ground beneath our feet, the renewed contact with the substrate that periodically we all have to have. Still, the seventy-two hours were enough. When the Stardust, herself rested, lifted gently like a living thing from her berth and the moon dropped away, we were all aboard, and we were all glad.

  Earth was in our viewports for a brief while. Then, under full timonium drive we flashed across the Solar System and into deep interstellar space beyond Pluto's orbit. Yet we were simply checking, getting ready for the journey. Light-minutes were nothing, even at the terrific finite speeds of which we were capable. Light-years were ahead of us. Eighty-eight of them. And that meant Ultraspan.

  We were in the hands of three unlikely geniuses—they abound on the Stardust—and I'm sure I've been more concerned for my life in a Paris taxi.

  Moe Cheng planned the stages. Cap'n Jules stood by to implement them, one by one. Johnny Rasmussen structured the patterns at the end of each stage, move by move. This was new space, and we were tracking sounds in a direction not determined by any scientific data. We could never have justified ourselves to any logical inquiry. Still, that didn't disturb me either. Computers can goof, but I'd never known Ursula's weird sixth sense to be entirely wrong.

  An Ultraspan stage can't be described. Nevertheless, I'll try. You are conscious in stage, but nothing has either importance or meaning. In effect, according to one school, during the jump you cease to exist as an entity, and the Nirvana-like consciousness is like a shadow projected forward, your id stripped of all concerns and without a home. I don't know. There is a perceptible time-span in stage, and you know it's there. Yet theoretically time does not exist, and with the effect of time suspended, one space is as likely as another. Still, stages can be plotted and the target space occupied. We've been doing it for years.

 

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