“Who would have thought I’d’ve found myself a hobby at my age?” he said. He’d bought himself a Norton’s Star Atlas to find out what he could see now that he had the telescope. He ran his finger down the listing of double stars. “Gamma Leonis,” he muttered, and then nodded. The star was bright enough to be easy to spot-not very far from Mars at the moment, in fact-and its components were far enough apart for his little refractor to be able to split them.

A couple of minutes later, he softly clapped his hands together. There they were, the brighter of the pair golden, the somewhat dimmer companion a dull red. A handsome one, he thought. Taking a pen from his breast pocket, he put a check by ?Leonis in the Norton’s. Little by little, he was learning the Greek alphabet, one more thing he’d never thought he’d do.

That bright, moving light in the northern sky was a plane coming in for a landing at Los Angeles International Airport. Airplane lights coming straight at him had once tricked him into thinking he’d discovered a couple of supernovas. He knew better now.

He glanced toward the back of the house. The room Mickey and Donald used was quiet and dark; they’d gone to sleep. Jonathan was still up studying. He had had the courtesy to pull down the shade. That golden glow didn’t bother Sam’s night vision much, where raw light from the overhead lamp would have.

Yeager sighed. He’d hoped Jonathan might get interested in astronomy, too, but no such luck. Oh, the kid had come out and peered through the telescope a couple of times, but what he saw didn’t excite him. Sam could tell. When Jonathan thought of heavenly bodies, he didn’t think of Jupiter or Gamma Leonis-he thought of Karen, or possibly Kassquit.

I was like that myself once upon a time, Sam thought. He remembered some of the cheap sporting houses he’d visited in his minor-league days-cheap because a guy in the bush leagues couldn’t afford any better and because a lot of the towns he went through didn’t boast any better. If he ever found out Jonathan was doing anything along those lines, he’d tan the kid’s hide for him. He recognized his own hypocrisy, and didn’t feel like doing anything about it. Do as I say, not as I do.

He clicked on the red light again to check what other double stars he could look for as long as he was out here. N Hydrae-a pair of stars of just about sixth magnitude, separated by a bit more than nine seconds of arc-was easily within the capacity of his telescope. He swung it south from Leo.

Splitting N Hydrae wouldn’t particularly challenge the scope. Finding it, though, would challenge him. Together, its stars added up to one fifth-magnitude object. In other words, it was invisible to the naked eye in the streetlight-saturated sky of Los Angeles. He would have to find a brighter nearby star he could see and then either starhop with the finder or use his setting circles to bring N Hydrae into view.

He decided to starhop; setting circles still seemed like black magic to him. Taking the telescope out to the middle of the back yard so he could see over the eucalyptus tree next door that helped spoil the view to the southeast, he realigned the polar axis on Polaris, then found the battered rectangle of stars that formed the main part of the constellation Corvus, and then went south and east from the Crow toward his target, checking his path with the star atlas each step of the way.

And there, by God, was the star that had to be N Hydrae. He turned off the flashlight and worked the slow-motion controls to center it on the finder’s crosshairs. He’d just turned away from the finder and bent his head toward the main telescope’s eyepiece when a noise from off to one side made him look up.

Someone was scrambling over the fence that separated Yeager’s yard from the one behind it. Sam straightened. He wished he had his . 45, but it was back in the house. The intruder-a man-dropped down into the yard and trotted toward the house.

He didn’t see Sam, who was partly screened by a lemon tree he’d planted a few years before. And, plainly, the intruder wasn’t looking for trouble. He came past the tree as if he had business to take care of and wanted to get it over with as fast as he could. Something that wasn’t a gun glistened in his right hand.

“Hello, there,” Yeager said. The other fellow stopped as dead as if he’d been turned to stone. Sam’s dark-adapted eyes had no trouble seeing how astonished he looked. Yeager didn’t waste more than an instant on his expression, though. He took advantage of the frozen surprise he’d created and jumped the intruder.

He got in a left to the face and a right to the belly that made the stranger double up. The other fellow tried to fight back after that, but never got the chance. One of the things the Army had taught Sam was that fighting fair wasted time and was liable to get you into trouble. As soon as he saw the opening, he kicked the intruder in the crotch.

The fellow let out a horrible shriek and dropped the thing he’d been holding. It was a bottle, and it smashed when it hit the grass. The stink of gasoline filled Yeager’s nostrils. “Christ!” he burst out. “That’s a fucking Molotov cocktail!”

Just winning the fight suddenly wasn’t enough any more. The intruder was down on the grass, writhing and clutching at himself. Sam kicked him again, this time in the face. He groaned and went limp.

“Jonathan!” Yeager shouted. He stood there in the back yard, his heart pounding. I’m too old for this, he thought. Mutt Daniels had said that when they went into combat against the Lizards. Sam was as old now as Mutt had been then. He understood how his ex-manager had felt. “Jonathan!” he yelled again.

A moment later, the back door opened. The porch light came on. “What’s up, Dad?” Jonathan asked.

Blinking against the glare, Sam pointed to the man he’d beaten. “This son of a bitch was going to try and burn our house down,” he said. Barbara would have wanted him to say try to burn. Right this second, he didn’t care what his wife would have wanted. “Don’t just stand there, goddammit. Throw me some twine so I can tie him, and then call the cops.”

“Right.” The porch light gleamed off Jonathan’s shaved scalp. He went back into the kitchen, found a ball of twine-good, solid stuff, not kite string-and threw it to Sam. Then he disappeared again. Yeager heard him talking on the phone and to Barbara. They both came out to see what was going on. By then, Sam had the intruder’s hands tied behind him and his ankles bound together.

The man’s eyes were open when the police got there. “Jesus Christ, Yeager,” a cop said, looking at the fragments of glass and sniffing the gasoline. “Somebody out there doesn’t like you much, does he?”

“Doesn’t look that way,” Sam answered. “Now that you’ve got this guy, maybe you can find out who.”

“Hope so,” the Gardena policeman said. “Let’s get him into proper handcuffs-gotta look right when we take him to the station, you know.”

“Okay by me,” Yeager said. “Give me a call when you know something, will you? I want to get to the bottom of this.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why anybody’d have it in for me, but somebody sure does.”

“Yeah.” While his partner covered him, the cop cut the twine with which Sam had bound the intruder and handcuffed him instead. Then he hauled him to his feet. “Come on, pal. We’ve got some talking to do.” He led him out to the squad car.

Yeager collapsed the legs to the telescope tripod and brought the instrument inside. “It’s a good thing you were out there,” Barbara said, shivering even though she was wearing a warm housecoat. “Otherwise…”

“Don’t remind me.” Sam stowed the scope on the service porch-the same spot Mickey and Donald’s incubator had once occupied. Then he poured himself a stiff belt of bourbon. After he’d downed it, he poured another one. That let him get some sleep.