The astronomer, frankly dubious, said, "But, really! An ellipse could hardly do that because a 'shortest path'--" "No?" said Hank. "You take a flat piece of paper. The quickest way acrost it is a straight line, ain't it?" "Naturally." "You take a globe of the world, though, an' things don't work the same. You want to go from, say, Los Angeles to Japan, you wouldn't follow straight across one of them lines of latitude, would you? You'd sort of hump up by way of Alaska." A listener nodded eagerly. "That's right. You'd take the arc of a great circle. The Great Circle route." "Well," said Hank, "same thing in the universe--which has got, near's I can figger out, another right angle in it besides the ones we know an' see." "You mean another dimension? A fourth dimension?" "Call it that. Anyhow, in this sort of super-globe which has four dimensions, stands to reason that the shortest distance from one point to another will be a closed figger. A sort of lopsided circle." * * * * * That stopped them cold for a moment. But Tomkins, the astronomer, wasn't through yet. "Our observations, Hank, also indicate that in this universe, every other galaxy is running away from ours as fast as it can. Why is this?" Cleaver repeated unbelievingly, "Runnin' away?" "Yes. Our spectroscopes show a 'red shift' in the apparent motion of all stars. This proves that the universe is expanding--" "Why, no!" said Hank. "Gosh, no!" "_No?_" "Why, you got it all backward," explained Horse-sense Hank. "What you're sayin' ain't reasonable. Truth of the matter is, the universe ain't expandin' at all. It's just a-standin' still. Reason things look thataway to us is because--we're contractin'!" And that really _did_ stop them! Even when Hank explained that the same effect would be visible to a man standing in the middle of the floor of a gigantic room while the walls receded, as would be visible to a man _shrinking_ in the middle of a normal-sized room. They didn't get it, but they tried. They took it home to sleep on. * * * * * So grew the fame of Horse-sense Hank. And while all this was going on, another thing was happening, too. Hank was seeing Helen MacDowell, practically every night. And--well, if you've ever seen a supercharged carton of honey and dynamite like Helen, you know the inevitable results. Love, with a capital _boom_! Old MacDowell had a fit--ee-eye-ee-eye-oh! But it did him no good. His mood was one of kill and boo, but Helen's was one of bill and coo. It got so every time I saw Hank and Helen together they looked a reproduction of the Laocoön[2] group. [Footnote 2: Laocoön (lay-ock-o-on) was a priest of Apollo who warned the Trojans against the wooden horse of the Greeks. As a result he and his two sons were destroyed by serpents sent by Athene, who'd placed her bet on Greece. This mythological tragedy is portrayed in a magnificent statue now in the Vatican at Rome.--Ed.]