The cynosure was a statue—a statue of a buck-toothed, wall-eyed youth gazing steadfastly up into the heavens. In one hand the youth held a Phillips screw driver, in the other a six-inch crescent wrench. Standing several yards away and staring raptly up into the statue's face was the youth himself, and so immobile was he that if it hadn't been for the pedestal on which the statue rested, Philip would have been unable to distinguish one from the other.
There was an inscription on the pedestal. He walked over and read it in the light cast by a nearby parterre of star-flowers:
FRANCIS FARNSWORTH
PFLEUGER,
DISCOVERER OF
PFLEUGERSVILLE
Born: May 5. 1941. Died: ——
Profession Inventor. On the first day of April of the year of our Lord, 1962, Francis Farnsworth Pfleuger brought into being a Möbius coincidence field and established multiple contact with the twenty-first satellite of the star Sirius, thereby giving the people of Valleyview access, via their back doorways, to a New World. Here we have come to live. Here we have come to raise our children. Here, in this idyllic village, which the noble race that once inhabited this fair planet left behind them when they migrated to the Greater Magellanic Cloud, we have settled down to create a new and better Way of Life. Here, thanks to Francis Farnsworth Pfleuger, we shall know happiness prosperity and freedom from fear.
FRANCIS FARNSWORTH PFLEUGER, WE, THE NEW INHABITANTS OF SIRIUS XXI, SALUTE YOU!
Philip wiped his forehead again.
Presently he noticed that the flesh-and-blood Francis Pfleuger was looking in his direction. “Me,” the flesh-and-blood Francis Pfleuger said, pointing proudly at the statue. “Me.”
“So I gather,” Philip said dryly. And then. “Zarathustra—come back here!”
The little dog had started down one of the paths that converged on the statue. At Philip's command, he stopped but did not turn; instead he remained where he was, as though waiting for someone to come down the path. After a moment, someone did—Judith Darrow.
She was wearing a simple white dress, reminiscent both in design and décor of a Grecian tunic. A wide gilt belt augmented the effect, and her delicate sandals did nothing to mar it. In the radiance of the star-flowers, her eyes were more gray than green. There were shadows under them, Philip noticed, and the lids were faintly red.