When people became amazed at his story he added to it. There had been five columns of light instead of one. The one he had first mentioned had touched the Earth, or had shot up from the Earth, within several miles of his point of vantage. A second glowed off to the northwest, a third to the southwest, a fourth to the southeast, the fifth to the northeast. The first one seemed to "center" the other four—they might have been the five legs of a table, according to their arrangement....
Arrangement! Jeter wondered how that word had happened to come to him.
The story of the fellow who had seen the columns of light might have been believed if he had stuck to his first yarn of seeing but one. But when he mentioned five ... well, he didn't have any too good a reputation for veracity and wasn't regarded as being overly bright. Besides, he had stated that the thickness of the columns of light seemed to be the same from the ground as far as his eyes could follow them upward. Everybody knew that a searchlight's beams spread out a bit.
"I wonder," thought Jeter, "why the kid didn't say he saw those five columns move—like a five-legged animal, walking."
Silly, of course, but behind the silliness of the thought Jeter thought there might be something of interest, something on which to work.
The Jeter-Eyer space ship still was not finished—though almost—when the world moved into the third week since the disappearance of Franz Kress.
An Indian in the Southwest had reported seeing one of those columns of light. However, this merited just a line on about page sixteen, even of the newspaper closest to the spot where the redskin had seen the column.
"Eyer," said Jeter at last, "we've got to start digging into newspaper stories, especially into stories which deal with unusually queer happenings throughout the world. I've a hunch that the keys to Kress' disappearance may be found in some of them, or a combination of a great many of them."
"How do you mean, Lucian?"