"How come?"
"Don't you read? Forget it. Look, Doc, you're actually the only scientist I know, so I want to ask a couple of questions."
"I'll try. But let's not lose sight of the fact that I'm not a credited scientist, as you put it. I'm a sort of cockeyed physicist whose job is to see that actors squinting through telescopes see Saturn at the right angle, and that birds looking through spectroscopes don't point at a blue triplet and call it the Sodium D Lines."
"You might be even better than a real physicist of the research kind," said Dusty.
"Thanks for them kind words, Dusty. Flattery will get you nowhere."
"I'm not trying flattery. You've been in this make-believe business for a long time. That's why you might be able to think it out."
"Go on, man. Spill your idea. What do you want me to do?"
"Let's assume that Dusty Britton's wild tale about a man named Scyth Radnor, from Marandis, is right. And that this guy came out of a spacecraft parked in the ocean, sitting on the sill of the spacelock waiting for me. He talked about the death of the general relativity theory in favor of something called the machinus theory of space-time, phanobands, menslators and all sorts of things."
"Yeah? We've been having space warps ever since the days of Jack Williamson."