at the sky. She was frowning, as though she resented the whole business.

"I don't see anything," she said.

"Look carefully," I said. "Watch one section at a time. There was one! Did you see it?"

"No."

"Watch for little winks," I said. But it wasn't until the Thomas kid came from next door and loaned her his telescope that she saw it.

"Here, Mrs. Ostersen, use this," the kid said. He had three or four telescopes in his hands, a pair of binoculars, and a handful of charts. Quite a kid.

"You too, Mr. Ostersen," he said.

Through the telescope I could really see it. One moment a pinpoint of light would be there, and then—bing! It was gone. It was down-right weird. For the first time I started getting worried.

It didn't bother Jane, though. She went back into her kitchen.

Of course, even with the galaxy collapsing, the dress business had to go on, but I found myself buying a newspaper four or five times a day and keeping the radio on in the store to find out what was going on. Everybody else was doing the same. People were even arguing about it on street corners.

The newspapers had about a thousand different theories. There were scientific articles on the red shift, and intergalactic dust; there were articles on stellar evolution and visual hallucination; the psychologists were trying to prove that the stars hadn't been there in the first place, or something like that.

I didn't know what to believe. The only article that made any sense to me was one written by a social commentator, and he wasn't even a full-fledged scientist. He said it looked as if someone was doing a big job of housecleaning in out galaxy.

The Thomas kid had his own theories. He was sure it was the work of invaders from another dimension. He told me they were sucking our galaxy into theirs, which was in another dimension, like dust into a vacuum cleaner.

"It's perfectly clear, Mr. Ostersen," he told me one evening after work. "They've started sucking in the outside stars at the other side of the Milky Way, and they're working through the centre. They'll 

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