“I don’t believe that!”
“Don’t haff to if ye don’t want to,” he said dogmatically. “But I’m tellin’ you what’s what. I know what I’m talkin’ about.”
“Well, let’s not quarrel about it. I guess you ought to know, but it looks funny to me. Tell me about the Big Dipper. That’s my favorite.”
“Well,” he replied, “it ain’t particularly interestin’ to astronomers, I guess. But d’ye see that star that’s right where you’d put your mouth if you was drinkin’ outa the dipper, and holdin’ the handle straight in front of you?”
After a pause: “Yes, I guess I know the one you mean.”
“That’s what’s called the Pointer. No matter which way the dipper turns, that star’s always pointing straight at the Pole Star. There’s the Pole Star—see it over there, with the Pointer pointin’at it?”
“Ye-yes—I guess so.”
“Five hundred centuries ago,” Joshua went on in a dreamy tone, “the Big Dipper looked like a cross. And five hundred centuries from now it’ll be in the shape of a steamer chair.”
“How do they know that, Josh? Nobody that’s living now was here five hundred centuries ago. And how ever can they tell what it’ll look like five hundred centuries from now? That sounds silly.”
“There’s nothin’ silly about science,” Joshua told her reprovingly. “Well, we know the direction that the stars are goin’. And we know how fast they’re goin’. So it’s easy to figger out where they were five hundred centuries ago, and where they’ll be five hundred centuries from now. And they’ll be just like I’m telling you. The Big Dipper’ll look like a steamer chair. Why, lissen here, Madge: If the fellas that built the hangin’ gardens of Babylon could come back here now they wouldn’t notice hardly any difference in the stars. The stars are travelin’ through space from eight to ten miles a second, but if those ole fellas could come back it would look like they’d moved only about half the size of the moon. You know what I mean—half the size that the moon looks like to us. Maybe half a foot, you’d say. Millions o’ miles up there look like half a foot to us.”