So until he took her home at one-thirty, he managed to forget astronomy. Nothing odd about that. It would have been strange if he had managed to remember it.
But his feeling of restlessness came back as soon as he left her. At first, he didn’t remember why. He knew merely that he didn’t feel quite like going home yet.
The corner tavern was still open, and he dropped in for a drink. He was having his second one when he remembered. He ordered a third.
“Hank,” he said to the bartender. “You know Pollux?”
“Pollux who?” asked Hank.
“Skip it,” said Roger. He had another drink and thought it over. Yes, he’d made a mistake somewhere. Pollux couldn’t have moved.
He went outside and started to walk home. He was almost there when it occurred to him look up at Pollux. Not that, with the naked eye, he could detect a displacement of a tenth of a second, but he felt curious.
He looked up, allocated himself by the sickle of Leo, and then found Gemini—Castor and Pollux were the only stars in Gemini visible, for it wasn’t a particularly good night for seeing. They were there, all right, but he thought they looked a little farther apart than usual. Absurd, because that would be a matter of degrees, not minutes or seconds.
He stared at them for a while and then looked across at the Dipper. Then he stopped walking and stood there. He closed his eyes and opened them again, carefully.
The Dipper just didn’t look right. It was distorted. There seemed to be more space between Alioth and Mizar, in the handle than between Mizar and Alkaid. Phecda and Merak, in the bottom of the Dipper, were closer together, making the angle between the bottom and the lip steeper. Quite a bit steeper.