"You've done enough, surely!" Sally cried.

"The United States," said Joe awkwardly, "is going to take over the Moon. I—can't miss having a hand in that! Not if it's at all possible!"

"I'm afraid you will miss it, Joe," Major Holt said detachedly. "The occupation of the Moon will be a Navy enterprise. Space Exploration Project facilities are being used to prepare for it, but the Navy won the latest battle of the Pentagon. The Navy takes over the Moon."

Joe looked startled. "But——"

"You're Space Exploration personnel," said the major with the same coolness. "You will be used to instruct naval personnel, and your space tug will be asked to go along to the Platform as an auxiliary vessel. For purposes of assisting in the landing of the Moonship at the Platform, you understand. You'll haul her away from the Platform when she's refueled and supplied, so she can start off for the Moon. But the occupation of the Moon will be strictly Navy."

Joe's expression became carefully unreadable. "I think," he said evenly, "I'd better not comment."

Major Holt nodded. "Very wise—not that we'd repeat anything you did say. But the point is, Joe, that just one day before the Moonship does take off, the United Nations will be informed that it is a United States naval vessel. The doctrine of the freedom of space—like the freedom of the seas—will be promulgated. And the United States will say that a United States naval task force is starting off into space on an official mission. To attack a Space Exploration ship is one thing. That's like a scientific expedition. But to fire on an American warship on official business is a declaration of war. Especially since that ship can shoot back—and will."

Joe listened. He said, "It's daring somebody to try another Pearl Harbor?"

"Exactly," said the major. "It's time for us to be firm—now that we can back it up. I don't think the Moonship will be fired on."

"But they'll need me and my gang just the same," said Joe slowly, "for tugboat work at the Platform?"

"Exactly," said the major.

"Then," Joe said doggedly, "they get us. My gang will gripe about being edged out of the trip. They won't like it. But they'd like backing out still less. We'll play it the way it's dealt—but we won't pretend to like it."

Major Holt's expression did not change at all, but Joe had an odd feeling that the major approved of him.

"Yes. That's right, Joe," his father added. "You—you'll have to go aloft once more, son. After that, we'll talk it over."

Sally hadn't said a word during the discussion, but she'd watched Joe every second. Later, out on the porch of the major's quarters, she had a great deal to say. But that couldn't affect the facts.

The world at large, of course, received no inkling of the events in preparation. The Shed and the town of Bootstrap and all the desert for a hundred-mile circle round about, were absolutely barred to all visitors. Anybody who came into that circle stayed in. Most people were kept out. All that anyone outside could discover was that enormous quantities of cryptic material had poured and still were pouring into the Shed. But this time security was genuinely tight. Educated guesses could be made, and they were made; but nobody outside the closed-in area save a very few top-ranking officials had any real knowledge. The world only knew that something drastic and remarkable was in prospect.

Mike, though, was able to write a letter to the girl who'd written him. Major Holt arranged it. Mike wrote his letter on paper supplied by Security, with ink supplied by Security, and while watched by Security officers. His letter was censored by Major Holt himself, and it did not reveal that Mike was back on Earth. But it did invite a reply—and Mike sweated as he waited for one.

The others had plenty to sweat about. Joe and Haney and the Chief were acting as instructors to the Moonship's crew. They taught practical space navigation. At first they thought they hadn't much to pass on, but they found out otherwise. They had to pass on data on everything from how to walk to how to drink coffee, how to eat, sleep, why one should wear gravity harness, and the manners and customs of ships in space. They had to show why in space fighting a ship might send missiles on before it, but would really expect to do damage with those it left behind. They had to warn of the dangers of unshielded sunshine, and the equal danger of standing in shadow for more than five minutes, and——

They had material for six months of instruction courses, but there was barely a week to pass it on. Joe was run ragged, but in spite of everything he managed to talk at some length with Sally. He found himself curiously anxious to discuss any number of things with his father, too, who suddenly appeared to be much more intelligent than Joe had ever noticed before.

He was almost unhappy when it was certain that the Moonship would take off for space on the following day. He talked about it with Sally the night before take-off.

"Look," he said awkwardly. "As far as I'm concerned this has turned out a pretty sickly business. But when we have got a base on the Moon, it'll be a good job done. There will be one thing that nobody can stop! Everybody's been living in terror of war. If we hold the Moon the cold war will be ended. You can't kick on my wanting to help end that!"

Sally smiled at him in the moonlight.

"And—meanwhile," said Joe clumsily, "well—when I come back we can do some serious talking about—well—careers and such things. Until then—no use. Right?"

Sally's smile wavered. "Very sensible," she agreed wrily. "And awfully silly, Joe. I know what kind of a career I want! What other fascinating topic do you know to talk about, Joe?"

"I don't know of any. Oh, yes! Mike got a letter from his girl. I don't know what she said, but he's walking on air."

"But it isn't funny!" said Sally indignantly. "Mike's a person! A fine person! If he'll let me, I'll write to his girl myself and—try to make friends with her so when you come back I—maybe I can be a sort of match-maker."

"That, I like!" Joe said warmly. "You're swell sometimes, Sally!"

Sally looked at him enigmatically in the moonlight.

"There are times when it seems to escape your attention," she observed.

* * * * *

The next morning she cried a little when he left her, to climb in the space tug which was so small a part of today's activity. Joe and his crew were the only living men who had ever made a round trip to the Platform and back. But now there was the Moonship to go farther than they'd been allowed. It was even clumsier in design than the Platform, though it was smaller. But it wasn't designed to stay in space. It was to rest on the powdery floor of a ring-mountain's central plain.

Let it get off into space, and somehow get to the Platform to reload. Then let it replace the rockets it would burn in this take-off and it could go on out to emptiness. It would make history as the first serious attempt by human beings to reach the Moon.

Joe and his followers would go along simply to handle guided missiles if it came to a fight, and to tow the Moonship to its wharf—the Platform—and out into midstream again when it resumed its journey. And that was all.

The Moonship lifted from the floor of the Shed to the sound of hundreds of pushpot engines.

Then the space tug roared skyward. Her take-off rockets here substituted for the pushpots. Her second-stage rockets were also of the nonpoisonous variety, because she fired them at a bare 60,000 feet. They were substitutes for the jatos the pushpots carried.

She was out in space when the third-stage rockets roared dully outside her hull.

When the Moonship crossed the west coast of Africa, the space tug was 400 miles below and 500 miles behind. When the Moonship crossed Arabia, the difference was 200 miles vertically and less than 100 in line.

Then the Moonship released small objects, steadied by gyroscopes and flung away by puffs of compressed air. The small objects spread out. Haney and Mike and the Chief had reloaded the firing racks from inside the ship, and now were intent upon control boards and radar. They pressed buttons. One by one, little puffs of smoke appeared in space. They had armed the little space missiles, setting off tiny flares which had no function except to prove that each missile was ready for use.

By the time the two space craft floated toward India, above an area from which war rockets had been known to rise, there were more little weapons floating with them. One screen of missiles hurtled on before the space tug, and another behind. Anything that came up from Earth would instantly be attacked by dozens of midget ships bent upon suicide.

Radar probed the space formation, but enemies of the fleet and the Platform very wisely did no more than probe. The Moonship and its attendants went across the Pacific, still rising. Above the longitude of Washington, the space tug left its former post and climbed, nudging the Moonship this way and that. And from behind, the Platform came floating splendidly.

Tiny figures in space suits extended the incredibly straight lines which were plastic hoses filled with air. Very, very gently indeed, the great, bulbous Platform and the squat, flat Moonship came together and touched. They moored in contact.

And then the inert small missiles that had floated below, all the way up, flared simultaneously. Their rockets emitted smoke. In fine alignment, they plunged forward through emptiness, swerved with a remarkable precision, and headed out for emptiness beyond the Platform's orbit. Their function had been to protect the Moonship on its way out. That function was performed. There were too many of them to recover, so they went out toward the stars.

When their rockets burned out they vanished. But a good hour later, when it was considered that they were as far out as they were likely to go, they began to blow up. Specks of flame, like the tiniest of new stars, flickered against the background of space.

But Joe and the others were in the Platform by then. They'd brought up mail for the crew. And they were back on duty.

The Platform seemed strange with the Moonship's crew aboard. It had been a gigantic artificial world with very few inhabitants. With twenty-five naval ratings about, plus the four of its regular crew, plus the space tug's complement, it seemed excessively crowded.

And it was busy. There were twenty-five new men to be guided as they applied what they'd been taught aground about life in space. It was three full Earthdays before the stores intended for the journey to the Moon and the maintenance of a base there really began to move. The tug and the space wagons had to be moored outside and reached only by space suits through small personnel airlocks.

And there was the matter of discipline. Lieutenant Commander Brown had been put in command of the Platform for experience in space. He was considered to be prepared for command of the Moonship by that experience. So now he turned over command of the Platform to Brent—he made a neat ceremony of it—and took over the ship that would go out to the Moon. He made another ceremony out of that.

In command of the Moonship, his manner to Joe was absolutely correct. He followed regulations to the letter—to a degree that left Joe blankly uncomprehending. But he wouldn't have gotten along in the Navy if he hadn't. He'd tried to do the same thing in the Platform, and it wasn't practical. But he ignored all differences between Joe and himself. He made no overtures of friendship, but that was natural. Unintentionally, Joe had defied him. He now deliberately overlooked all that, and Joe approved of him—within limits.

But Mike and Haney and the Chief did not. They laid for him. And they considered that they got him. When he took over the Moonship, Lieutenant Commander Brown naturally maintained naval discipline and required snappy, official naval salutes on all suitable occasions, even in the Platform. And Joe's gang privately tipped off the noncommissioned personnel of the Moonship. Thereafter, no enlisted man ever saluted Lieutenant Brown without first gently detaching his magnet-soled shoes from the floor. When a man was free, a really snappy salute gave a diverting result. The man's body tilted forward to meet his rising arm, the upward impetus was one-sided, and every man who saluted Brown immediately made a spectacular kowtow which left him rigidly at salute floating somewhere overhead with his back to Lieutenant Brown. With a little practice, it was possible to add a somersault to the other features. On one historic occasion, Brown walked clanking into a storeroom where a dozen men were preparing supplies for transfer to the Moonship. A voice cried, "Shun!" And instantly twelve men went floating splendidly about the storeroom, turning leisurely somersaults, all rigidly at salute, and all wearing regulation poker faces.

An order abolishing salutes in weightlessness followed shortly after.

It took four days to get the transfer of supplies properly started. It took eight to finish the job. Affixing fresh rockets to the outside of the Moonship's hull alone called for long hours in space suits. During this time Mike floated nearby in a space wagon. One of the Navy men was a trifle overcourageous. He affected to despise safety lines. Completing the hook-on of a landing rocket, he straightened up too abruptly and went floating off toward the Milky Way.

Mike brought him back. After that there was less trouble.

Even so, the Moonship and the Platform were linked together for thirteen full days, during which the Platform seemed extraordinarily crowded. On the fourteenth day the two ships sealed off and separated. Joe and his crew in the space tug hauled the Moonship a good five miles from the Platform.

The space tug returned to the Platform. A blinker signal came across the five-mile interval. It was a very crisp, formal, Navy-like message.

Then the newly-affixed rockets on the Moonship's hull spurted their fumes. The big ship began to move. Not outward from Earth, of course. That was where it was going. But it had the Platform's 12,000 miles per hour of orbital speed. If the bonds of gravitation could have been snapped at just the proper instant, that speed alone would have carried the Moonship all the way to its destination. But they couldn't. So the Moonship blasted to increase its orbital speed. It would swing out and out, and as the Earth's pull grew weaker with distance the same weight of rockets would move the same mass farther and farther toward the Moon. The Moonship's course would be a sort of slowly flattening curve, receding from Earth and becoming almost a straight line where Earth's and the Moon's gravitational fields cancelled each other.

From there, the Moonship would have only to brake its fall against a gravity one-sixth that of Earth, and reaching out a vastly shorter distance.

Joe and the others watched the roiling masses of rocket fumes as the ship seemed to grow infinitely small.

"We should've been in that ship," said Haney heavily when the naked eye could no longer pick it out. "We could've beat her to the Moon!"

Joe said nothing. He ached a little inside. But he reflected that the men who'd guided the Platform to its orbit had been overshadowed by himself and Haney and the Chief and Mike. A later achievement always makes an earlier one look small. Now the four of them would be forgotten. History would remember the commander of the Moonship.

Forgotten? Yes, perhaps. But the names of the four of them, Joe and Haney and the Chief and Mike, would still be remembered in a language Joe couldn't speak, in a small village he couldn't name, on those occasions when the Mohawk tribe met in formal council.

The Chief grumbled. Mike stared out the port with bitter envy.

"It was a dirty trick," growled the Chief. "We shoulda been part of the first gang ever to land on the Moon!"

Joe grimaced. His crew needed to be cured of feeling the same way he did.

"I wouldn't say this outside of our gang," said Joe carefully, "but if it hadn't been for us four that ship wouldn't be on the way at all. Haney figured the trick that got us back to Earth the first time, or else we'd have been killed. If we had been killed, Mike wouldn't have figured out the metal-concrete business. But for him, that Moonship wouldn't even be a gleam in anybody's eye. And if the Chief hadn't blown up that manned rocket we fought in the space wagons, there wouldn't be any Platform up here to reload and refuel the Moonship. So they left us behind! But just among the four of us I think we can figure that if it hadn't been for us they couldn't have made it!"

Haney grinned slowly at Joe. The Chief regarded him with irony. Mike said, "Yeah. Haney, and me, and the Chief. We did it all."

"Uh-huh," said the Chief sardonically. "Us three. Just us three. Joe didn't do anything. Just a bum, he is. We oughta tell Sally he's no good and she oughta pick herself out a guy that'll amount to something some day." He hit Joe between the shoulders. "Sure! Just a bum, Joe! That's all! But we got a weakness for you. We'll let you hang around with us just the same! Come on, guys! Let's get something to eat!"

The four of them marched down a steel-floored corridor, their magnetic-soled shoes clanking on the plates. Their progress was uncertain and ungainly and altogether undignified. Suddenly the Chief began to bawl a completely irrelevant song to the effect that the inhabitants of the kingdom of Siam were never known to wash their dishes. Haney chimed in, and Mike. They were all very close together, and they were not at all impressive. But it hit Joe very hard, this sudden knowledge that the others didn't really care. It was the first time it had occurred to him that Haney and Mike and the Chief would rather be left behind with him, as a gang, than go on to individual high achievement in a first landing on the Moon.

It felt good. It felt real good.

* * * * *

But that, and all other sources of satisfaction, was wiped out by news that came back from the Moonship a bare six hours later.

The Moonship was in trouble. The sequence and timing of its rocket blasts were worked out on Earth, and checked by visual and radar observation. The computations were done by electronic brains the Moonship could not possibly have carried. And everything worked out. The ship was on course and its firings were on schedule.

But then the unexpected happened. It was an error which no machine could ever have predicted, for which statistics and computations could never have compensated. It was a human error. At the signal for the final acceleration blast, the pilot of the Moonship had fired the wrong set of rockets.

Inexperience, stupidity, negligence, excitement—the reason didn't matter. After years of planning and working and dreaming, one human finger had made a mistake. And the mistake was fatal!

When the mistake was realized, they'd had sense enough to cut loose the still-firing rockets. But the damage had been done. The ship was still plunging on. It would reach the Moon. But it wouldn't land in Aristarchus crater as planned. It would crash. If every rocket remaining mounted on the hull were to be fired at the best possible instant, the Moonship would hit near Copernicus, and it would land with a terminal velocity of 800 feet per second—540 miles an hour.

It could even be calculated that when the Moonship landed, the explosion ought to be visible from Earth with a fairly good telescope. It was due to take place in thirty-two hours plus or minus a few minutes.



11

The others got the space tug into the platform's lock and did things to it, in the way of loading, that its designers never intended, while Joe was calling Earth for calculations. The result was infuriating. The Moonship had taken off for the Moon on the other side of the Platform's orbit, when it had a velocity of more than 12,000 miles an hour in the direction it wished to go. The Platform and of course the space tug was now on the reverse side of the Platform's orbit. And of course they now had a velocity of more than 12,000 miles per hour away from the direction in which it was urgently necessary for the space tug to go. They could wait for two hours to take off, said Earth, or waste the time and fuel they'd need to throw away to duplicate the effect of waiting.

"But we can't wait!" raged Joe. Then he snapped. "Look here! Suppose we take off from here, dive at Earth, make a near-graze, and let its gravity curve our course! Like a cometary path! Figure that! That's what we've got to do!"

He kicked off his magnetic-soled shoes and went diving down to the airlock. Over his shoulder he panted an order for the radar-duty man to relay anything from Earth down to him there. He arrived to find Haney and Mike in hot argument over whether it was possible to load on an extra ton or two of mass. He stopped it. They would.

"Everything's loaded?" he demanded. "Okay! Space suits! All set? Let's get out of this lock and start blasting!"

He drove them into the space tug. He climbed in himself. He closed the entrance port. The plastic walls of the lock bulged out, pulled back fast, and the steering rockets jetted. The space tug came out of the lock. It spun about. It aimed for Earth and monstrous bursts of rocket-trail spread out behind it. It dived.

Naturally! When a ship from the Platform wanted to reach Earth for atmosphere-deceleration, it was more economical to head away from it. Now that it was the most urgent of all possible necessities to get away from Earth, in the opposite direction to the space tug's present motion, it was logical to dive toward it. The ship would plunge toward Earth, and Earth's gravity would help its rockets in the attainment of frenzied speed. But the tug still possessed its orbital speed. So it would not actually strike the Earth, but would be carried eastward past its disk, even though aimed for Earth's mid-bulge. Yet Earth would continue to pull. As the space tug skimmed past, its path would be curved by the pull of gravity. At the nearest possible approach to Earth, the tug would fire its heaviest rockets for maximum acceleration. And it would swing around Earth's atmosphere perhaps no more than 500 miles high—just barely beyond the measurable presence of air—and come out of that crazy curve a good hour ahead of the Platform for a corresponding position, and with a greater velocity than could be had in any other way. Traced on paper, the course of the tug would be a tight parabola.

The ship dived. And it happened that it had left the Platform and plunged deep in Earth's shadow, so that the look and feel of things was that of an utterly suicidal plunge into oblivion. There was the seeming of a vast sack of pure blackness before the nose of the space tug. She started for it at four gravities acceleration, and Joe got his headphones to his ears and lay panting while he waited for the figures and information he had to have.

He got them. When the four-gravity rockets burned out, the tug's crew painstakingly adjusted the ship's nose to a certain position. They flung themselves back into the acceleration chairs and Joe fired a six-g blast. They came out of that, and he fired another. The three blasts gave the ship a downward speed of a mile and a half a second, and Earth's pull added to it steadily. The Earth itself was drawing them down most of a 4,000-mile fall, which added to the speed their rockets built up.

Down on Earth, radar-bowls wavered dizzily, hunting for them to feed them observations of position and data for their guidance. Back on the Platform, members of the crew feverishly made their own computations. When the four in the Space tug were half-way to Earth, they were traveling faster than any humans had ever traveled before, relative to the Earth or the Platform itself. When they were a thousand miles from Earth, it was certain they would clear its edge. Joe proposed and received an okay to fire a salvo of Mark Tens to speed the ship still more. When they burned to the release-point and flashed away past the ports, the Chief and Haney panted up from their chairs and made their way aft.

"Going to reload the firing-frames," gasped the Chief.

They vanished. The space tug could take rockets from its cargo and set them outside its hull for firing. No other ship could.

Haney and the Chief came back. There was dead silence in the ship, save for a small, tinny voice in Joe's headphones.

"We'll pass Earth 600 miles high," said Joe in a flat voice. "Maybe closer. I'm going to try to make it 450. We'll be smack over enemy territory, but I doubt they could hit us. We'll be hitting better than six miles a second. If we wanted to, we could spend some more rockets and hit escape velocity. But we want to stop, later. We'll ride it out."

Silence. Stillness. Speed. Out the ports to Earthward there was purest blackness. On the other side, a universe of stars. But the blackness grew and grew and grew until it neatly bisected the cosmos itself, and half of everything that was, was blackness. Half was tiny colored stars.

Then there was a sound. A faint sound. It was a moan. It was a howl. It was a shriek.... And then it was a mere thin moan again. Then it was not.

"We touched air," said Joe calmly, "at six and a quarter miles per second. Pretty thin, though. At that, we may have left a meteor-trail for the populace to admire."

Nobody said anything at all. In a little while there was light ahead. There was brightness. Instantly, it seemed, they were out of night and there was a streaming tumult of clouds flashing past below—but they were 800 miles up now—and Joe's headphones rattled and he said:

"Now we can give a touch of course-correction, and maybe a trace of speed...."

Rockets droned and boomed and roared outside the hull. The Earth fell away and away and presently it was behind. And they were plunging on after the Moonship which was very, very, very far on before them.

It was actually many hours before they reached it. They couldn't afford to overtake it gradually, because they had to have time to work in after contact. But overtaking it swiftly cost extra fuel, and they hadn't too much. So they compromised, and came up behind the Moonship at better than 2,000 feet per second difference in speed—they approached it as fast as most rifle-bullets travel—and all creation was blotted out by the fumes of the rockets they fired for deceleration.

Then the space tug came cautiously close to the Moonship. Mike climbed out on the outside of the tug's hull, with the Chief also in space equipment, paying out Mike's safety-line. Mike leaped across two hundred yards of emptiness with light-years of gulf beneath him. His metal soles clanked on the Moonship's hull.

Then the vision-screen on the tug lighted up. Lieutenant Commander Brown looked out of it, quietly grim. Joe flicked on his own transmitter. He nodded.

"Mr. Kenmore," said Brown evenly, "I did not contact you before because I was not certain that contact could be made. How many passengers can you take back to the Platform?"

Joe blinked at him.

"I haven't any idea," he said. "But I'm going to hitch on and use our rockets to land you."

"I do not think it practicable," said Brown calmly. "I believe the only result of such a course will be the loss of both ships with all hands. I will give you a written authorization to return on my order. But since all my crew can't return, how many can you take? I have ten married men aboard. Six have children. Can you take six? Or all ten?" Then he said without a trace of emphasis, "Of course, none of them will be officers."

"If I tried to turn back now, I think my crew would mutiny," Joe said coldly. "I'd hate to think they wouldn't, anyhow! We're going to hook on and play this out the way it lies!"

There was a pause. Then Brown spoke again. "Mr. Kenmore, I was hoping you'd say that. Actually—er—not to be quoted, you understand—actually, intelligent defiance has always been in the traditions of the Navy. Of course, you're not in the Navy, Kenmore, but right now it looks like the Navy is in your hands. Like a battleship in the hands of a tug. Good luck, Kenmore."

Joe flicked off the screen. "You know," he said, winking at Mike, "I guess Brown isn't such a bad egg after all. Let's go!"

In minutes, the space tug had a line made fast. In half an hour, the two space craft were bound firmly together, but far enough apart for the rocket blasts to dissipate before they reached the Moonship. Mike returned to the tug. A pair of the big Mark Twenty rockets burned frenziedly in emptiness.

The Moonship was slowed by a fraction of its speed. The deceleration was hardly perceptible.

There were more burnings. Back on Earth there were careful measurements. A tight beam tends to attenuate when it is thrown a hundred thousand miles. It tends to! When speech is conducted over it, the lag between comment and reply is perceptible. It's not great—just over half a second. But one notices it. That lag was used to measure the speed and distance of the two craft. The prospect didn't look too good.

The space tug burned rocket after rocket after rocket. There was no effect that Joe could detect, of course. It would have been like noticing the effect of single oar-strokes in a rowboat miles from shore. But the instruments on Earth found a difference. They made very, very, very careful computations. And the electronic brains did the calculations which battalions of mathematicians would have needed years to work out. The electronic calculations which could not make a mistake said—that it was a toss-up.

The Moon came slowly to float before the two linked ships. It grew slowly, slowly larger. The word from Earth was that considering the rockets still available in the space tug, and those that should have been fired but weren't on the Moonship, there must be no more blasts just yet. The two ships must pass together through the neutral-point where the gravities of Earth and Moon exactly cancel out. They must fall together toward the Moon. Forty miles above the lunar surface such-and-such rockets were to be fired. At twenty miles, such-and-such others. At five miles the Moonship itself must fire its remaining fuel-store. With luck, it was a toss-up. Safety or a smash.

But there was a long time to wait. Joe and his crew relaxed in the space tug. The Chief looked out a port and observed:

"I can see the ring-mountains now. Naked-eye stuff, too! I wonder if anybody ever saw that before!"

"Not likely," said Joe.

Mike stared out a port. Haney looked, also.

"How're we going to get back, Joe?"

"The Moonship has rockets on board," Joe told him. "Only they can't stick them in the firing-racks outside. They're stowed away, all shipshape, Navy fashion. After we land, we'll ask politely for rockets to get back to the Platform with. It'll be a tedious run. Mostly coasting—falling free. But we'll make it."

"If everything doesn't blow when we land," said the Chief.

Joe said uncomfortably: "It won't. Not that somebody won't try." Then he stopped. After a moment he said awkwardly: "Look! It's necessary that we humans get to the stars, or ultimately we'll crowd the Earth until we won't be able to stay human. We'd have to have wars and plagues and such things to keep our numbers down. It—it seems to me, and I—think it's been said before, that it looks like there's something, somewhere, that's afraid of us humans. It doesn't want us to reach the stars. It didn't want us to fly. Before that it didn't want us to learn how to cure disease, or have steam, or—anything that makes men different from the beasts."

Haney turned his head. He listened intently.

"Maybe it sounds—superstitious," said Joe uneasily, "but there's always been somebody trying to smash everything the rest of us wanted. As if—as if something alien and hateful went around whispering hypnotically into men's ears while they slept, commanding them irresistibly to do things to smash all their own hopes."

The Chief grunted. "Huh! D'you think that's new stuff, Joe?"

"N-no," admitted Joe. "But it's true. Something fights us. You can make wild guesses. Maybe—things on far planets that know that if ever we reach there.... There's something that hates men and it tries to make us destroy ourselves."

"Sure," said Haney mildly. "I learned about that in Sunday School, Joe."

"Maybe I mean that," said Joe helplessly. "But anyhow there's something we fight—and there's Something that fights with us. So I think we're going to get the Moonship down all right."

Mike said sharply: "You mean you think this is all worked out in advance. That we'd be here, we'd get here——"

The Chief said impatiently, "It's figured out so we can do it if we got the innards. We got the chance. We can duck it. But if we duck it, it's bad, and somebody else has to have the chance later. I know what Joe's saying. Us men, we got to get to the stars. There's millions of 'em, and we need the planets they've got swimming around 'em."

Haney said, "Some of them have planets. That's known. Yeah."

"Those planets ain't going to go on forever with nobody using 'em," grunted the Chief. "It don't make sense. And things in general do make sense. All but us humans," he finished with a grin. "And I like us, anyhow. Joe's right. We'll get by this time. And if we don't—some other guys'll have to do the job of landing on the Moon. But it'll be done—as a starter."

"I can see lots of mountains down there. Plain," Mike said quietly.

"What's the radar say?"

Joe looked. Back at the Platform it had shown the curve of the surface of Earth. Here a dim line was beginning to show on the vertical-plane screen. It was the curve of the surface of the Moon.

"We might as well get set," said Joe. "We've got time but we might as well. Space suits on. I'll tighten up the chain. Steering rockets'll do that. Then we'll take a last look. All firing racks loaded outside?"

"Yeah," said Haney. He grinned wrily. "You know, Joe, I know what I know, but still I'm scared."

"Me, too," said Joe.

But there were things to do. They took their places. They watched out the ports. The Moon had seemed a vast round ball a little while back. Now it appeared to be flattening. Its edges still curved away beyond a surprisingly nearby horizon. The ring-mountains were amazingly distinct. There were incredibly wide, smooth spaces with mottled colorings. But the mountains....

When the ships were 40 miles high the space tug blasted valorously, and all the panorama of the Moon's surface was momentarily hidden by the racing clouds of mist. The rockets burned out.

Haney and the Chief replaced the burned-out rockets. They were gigantic, heavy-bore tubes which they couldn't have stirred on Earth. Now they loaded them into the curious locks which conveyed them outside the hull into firing position.

The ring-mountains were gigantic when they blasted again! They were only 20 miles up, then, and some of the peaks rose four miles from their inner crater floors.

The ships were still descending fast. Joe spoke into his microphone.

"Calling Moonship! Calling——" He stopped and said matter-of-factly, "I suggest we fire our last blast together. Shall I give the word? Right!"

The surface of the Moon came toward them. Craters, cracks, frozen fountains of stone, swelling undulations of ground interrupted without rhyme or reason by the gigantic splashings of missiles from the sky a hundred thousand million years ago. The colorings were unbelievable. There were reds and browns and yellows. There were grays and dusty deep-blues and streaks of completely impossible tints in combination.

But Joe couldn't watch that. He kept his eyes on a very special gadget which was a radar range-finder. He hadn't used it about the Platform because there were too many tin cans and such trivia floating about. It wouldn't be dependable. But it did measure the exact distance to the nearest solid object.

"Prepare for firing on a count of five," said Joe quietly. "Five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... fire!"

The space tug's rockets blasted. For the first time since they overtook the Moonship, the tug now had help. The remaining rockets outside the Moonship's hull blasted furiously. Out the ports there was nothing but hurtling whitenesses. The rockets droned and rumbled and roared....

The main rockets burned out. The steering rockets still boomed. Joe had thrown them on for what good their lift might do.

"Joe!" said Haney in a surprised tone. "I feel weight! Not much, but some! And the main rockets are off!"

Joe nodded. He watched the instruments before him. He shifted a control, and the space tug swayed. It swayed over to the limit of the tow-chain it had fastened to the Moonship. Joe shifted his controls again.

There was a peculiar, gritty contact somewhere. Joe cut the steering rockets and it was possible to look out. There were more gritty noises. The space tug settled a little and leaned a little. It was still. Then there was no noise at all.

"Yes," said Joe. "We've got some weight. We're on the Moon."

They went out of the ship in a peculiarly solemn procession. About them reared cliffs such as no man had ever looked on before save in dreams. Above their heads hung a huge round greenish globe, with a white polar ice-cap plainly visible. It hung in mid-sky and was four times the size of the Moon as seen from Earth. If one stood still and looked at it, it would undoubtedly be seen to be revolving, once in some twenty-four hours.

Mike scuffled in the dust in which he walked. Nobody had emerged from the Moonship yet. The four of them were literally the first human beings ever to set foot on the surface of the Moon. But none of them mentioned the fact, though all were acutely aware of it. Mike kicked up dust. It rose in a curiously liquid-like fashion. There was no air to scatter it. It settled deliberately back again.

Mike spoke with an odd constraint. "No green cheese," he said absurdly.

"No," agreed Joe. "Let's go over to the Moonship. It looks all right. It couldn't have landed hard."

They went toward the bulk of the ship from Earth, which now was a base for the military occupation of a globe with more land-area than all Earth's continents put together—but not a drop of water. The Moonship was tilted slightly askew, but it was patently unharmed. There were faces at every port in the hull.

The Chief stopped suddenly. A sizable boulder rose from the dust. The Chief struck it smartly with his space-gloved hand.

"I'm counting coup on the Moon!" he said zestfully "Tie that, you guys!"

Then he joined the others on their way to the Moonship's main lock.

"Shall we knock?" asked Mike humorously. "I doubt they've got a door-bell!"

But the lock-door was opening to admit them. They crowded inside.

Commander Brown was waiting for them with an out-stretched hand. "Glad to have you aboard." And there was a genuine smile creeping across his face.

* * * * *

Joe talked with careful distinctness into a microphone. His voice took a little over a second to reach its destination. Then there was a pause of the same length before the first syllable of Sally's reply came to him from Earth.

"I've reported to your father," said Joe carefully, "and the Moonship has reported to the Navy. In a couple of hours Haney and the Chief and Mike and I will be taking off to go back to the Platform. We got rockets from the stores of the Moonship."

Sally's voice was surprisingly clear. It wavered a little, but there was no sound of static to mar reception.

"Then what, Joe?"

"I'm bringing written reports and photographs and first specimens of geology from the Moon," Joe told her. "I'm a mailman. It'll probably be sixty hours back to the Platform—free fall most of the way—and then we'll refuel and I'll come down to Earth to deliver the reports and such."

Pause. One second and a little for his voice to go. Another second and something over for her voice to return.

"And then?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out," said Joe. "What day is today?"

"Tuesday," said Sally after the inevitable pause. "It's ten o'clock Tuesday morning at the Shed."

Joe made calculations in his mind. Then he said:

"I ought to land on Earth some time next Monday."

Pause.

"Yes?" said Sally.

"I wondered," said Joe. "How about a date that night?" Another pause. Then Sally's voice. She sounded glad.

"It's a date, Joe. And—do you know, I must be the first girl in the world to make a date with the Man in the Moon?"



COMBAT MISSION!

Joe Kenmore's mission was as dangerous as it sounded simple:

"DELIVER SUPPLIES AND ATOMIC WEAPONS TO THE SPACE PLATFORM. THEN PREPARE FOR MAN'S FIRST EXPEDITION TO THE MOON."

Joe had helped launch the first Space Platform—that initial rung in man's ladder to the stars. But the enemies who had ruthlessly tried to destroy the space station before it left Earth were still at work. They were plotting to stop Joe's mission!

Cover painting by Robert Schulz

Transcriber's Note The chemical symbol for carbon dioxide has been shown as CO_2 to depict a subscript 2. In the following words, the hyphen has been removed to conform to majority use in text. brain-storm loud-speaker The following words with and without a hyphen were left as such because of equal prevalence of both forms: half-way halfway pay-load payload rocket-lift rocketlift sun-lamps sunlamps hand-hold handhold pin-points pinpoints "overall" and "over-all" were left as such since the writers are different (The narrator and a character). The following typos have been corrected: Adorning Adoring level lever runing running shed Shed thiry-nine thirty-nine

THE END