Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein

The fact is I am a compulsive reader. Thirty-five cents’ worth of Gold Medal Original will put me right to sleep. Or Perry Mason. But I’ll read the ads in an old Paris-Match that has been used to wrap herring before I’ll do without.

I got up and went around the tent. “Psst! Rufo.”

“Yes, milord.” He was up fast, a dagger in his hand.

“Look, is there anything to read around this dump?”

“What sort of thing?”

“Anything, just anything. Words in a row.”

“Just a moment.” He was gone a while, using a flashlight around that beachhead dump of plunder. He came back and offered me a book and a small camp lamp. I thanked him, went back, and lay down.

It was an interesting book, written by Albertus Magnus and apparently stolen from the British Museum. Albert offered a long list of recipes for doing unlikely things: how to pacify storms and fly over clouds, how to overcome enemies, how to make a woman be true to you–

Here’s that last one: “If thou wilt that a woman bee not visions nor desire men, take the private members of a Woolfe, and the haires which doe grow on the cheekes, or the eye-brows of him, and the hairs which bee under his beard, and burne it all, and give it to her to drinke, when she knowethe not, and she shal desire no other man.”

This should annoy the “Woolfe.” And if I were the gal, it would annoy me, too; it sounds like a nauseous mixture. But that’s the exact formula, spelling and all, so if you are having trouble keeping her in line and have a “Woolfe” handy, try it. Let me know the results. By mail, not in person.

There were several recipes for making a woman love you who does not but a “Woolfe” was by far the simplest ingredient. Presently I put the book down and the light out and watched the moving silhouette on that translucent silk. Star was brushing her hair.

Then I quit tormenting myself and watched the stars, I’ve never learned the stars of the Southern Hemisphere; you seldom see stars in a place as wet as Southeast Asia and a man with a bump of direction doesn’t need them.

But that southern sky was gorgeous.

I was staring at one very bright star or planet (it seemed to have a disk) when suddenly I realized it was moving.

I sat up. “Hey! Star!”

She called back, “Yes, Oscar?”

“Come see! A sputnik. A big one!”

“Coming.” The light in her tent went out, she joined me quickly, and so did good old Pops Rufo, yawning and scratching his ribs. “Where, milord?” Star asked.

I pointed. “Right there! On second thought it may not be a sputnik; it might be one of our Echo series. It’s awfully big and bright.”

She glanced at me and looked away. Rufo said nothing. I stared at it a while longer, glanced at her. She was watching me, not it. I looked again, watched it move against the backdrop of stars.

“Star,” I said, “that’s not a sputnik. Nor an Echo balloon. That’s a moon. A real moon.”

“Yes, milord Oscar.”

“Then this is not Earth.”

“That is true.”

“Hmm–” I looked back at the little moon, moving so fast among the stars, west to east.

Star said quietly, “You are not afraid, my hero?”

“Of what?”

“Of being in a strange world.”

“Seems to be a pretty nice world.”

“It is,” she agreed, “in many ways.”

“I like it,” I agreed. “But maybe it’s time I knew more about it. Where are we? How many light-years, or whatever it is, in what direction?”

She sighed. “I will try, milord. But it will not be easy; you have not studied metaphysical geometry–nor many other things. Think of the pages of a book–” I still had that cookbook of Albert the Great under my arm; she took it. “One page may resemble another very much. Or be very different. One page can be so close to another that it touches, at all points–yet have nothing to do with the page against it. We are as close to Earth–right now–as two pages in sequence in a book. And yet we are so far away that light-years cannot express it.”