Unbelievingly, he ran an imaginary line from the pointers, Merak and Dubhe, to the North Star. The line curved. It had to. If he ran it straight, it missed Polaris by maybe five degrees.
Breathing a bit hard, Roger took off his glasses and polished them very carefully with his handkerchief. He put them back on again, and the Dipper was still crooked. So was Leo when he looked back to it. At any rate, Regulus wasn’t where it should be by a degree or two. A degree or two! At the distance of Regulus. Was it sixty-five light years? Something like that.
Then, in time to save his sanity, Roger remembered that he’d been drinking. He went home without daring to look upward again. He went to bed but he couldn’t sleep.
He didn’t feel drunk. He grew more excited, wide awake.
Roger wondered if he dared phone the observatory. Would he sound drunk over the phone? The devil with whether he sounded drunk or not, he finally decided. He went to the telephone in his pajamas.
“Sorry,” said the operator.
“What d’ya mean, sorry?”
“I cannot give you that number,” said the operator in dulcet tones. And then, “I am sorry. We do not have that information.”
He got the chief operator and the information. Cole Observatory had been so deluged with calls from amateur astronomers that they had found it necessary to request the telephone company to discontinue all incoming calls save long distance ones from other observatories.
“Thanks,” said Roger. “Will you get me a cab?”