As he uttered the question Chick held his breath. It had suddenly struck him that he had touched an extremely definite point. The answer might PLACE him!
“You mean, my lord, how long is a circle in term of days?”
“Yes!”
“Three hundred and sixty-five and a fraction, my lord.”
Watson was dumbfounded. Could there be, in all the universe, another world with precisely the same revolution period? But he could not afford to show his concern. He said:
“Tell me, have you a moon?”
“Yes; it has a cycle of about twenty-eight days.”
Watson drew a deep breath. Inconceivable though it appeared, he was still on his own earth. For a moment he pondered, wondering if he had been caught up in tangle of time-displacement. Could it be that, instead of living in the present, he had somehow become entangled in the past or in the future?
If so—and by now he was so accustomed to the unusual that he considered this staggering possibility with equanimity—if the time coefficient was at fault, then how to account for the picture of the professor, in that leaf? Had they both been the victims of a ghastly cosmic joke?
There was but one way to find out.