“A Moon-maiden,” said Selene, derisively.

“No maiden,” said Neville. “Though you may have to wait a long while before I confirm the matter once again.”

She seemed unmoved at that.

He said, “And about this big danger of explosion. If the risk involved in changing the basic constants of a Universe is so great, why haven’t the para-men, who are so far advanced beyond us in technology, stopped Pumping?”

And he left.

She faced the closed door with bunched jaw muscles. Then she said, “Because conditions are different for them and for us, you incredible jerk.” But she was speaking to herself; he was gone.

She kicked the lever that let down her bed, threw herself into it and seethed. How much closer was she now to the real object for which Barren and those others had now been aiming for years?

No closer.

Energy! Everyone searched for energy! The magic word! The cornucopia! The one key to universal plenty! ... And yet energy wasn’t all.

If one found energy, one could find the other, too. If one found the key to energy, the key to the other would be obvious. She knew the key to the other would be obvious if she could but grasp some subtle point that would appear obvious the moment it was grasped. (Good heavens, she had been so infected by Barren’s chronic suspicion that even in her thoughts she was calling it “the other.”)

No Earthman would get that subtle point because no Earthman had reason to look for it.

Ben Denison would find it for her, then, without finding it for himself.

Except that— If the Universe was to be destroyed, what did anything matter?

12

Denison tried to beat down his self-consciousness. Time and again, he made a groping motion as though to hitch upward the pants he wasn’t wearing. He wore only sandals and the barest of briefs, which were uncomfortably tight. And, of course, he carried the blanket.

Selene, who was similarly accoutered, laughed. “Now, Ben, there’s nothing wrong with your bare body, barring a certain flabbiness. It’s perfectly in fashion here. In fact, take off your briefs if they’re binding you.”

“No!” muttered Denison. He shifted the blanket so that it draped over his abdomen and she snatched it from him.

She said, “Now give me that thing. What kind of a Lunarite will you make if you bring your Earth puritanism here? You know that prudery is only the other side of prurience. The words are even on the same page in the dictionary.”

“I have to get used to it, Selene.”

“You might start by looking at me once in awhile, without having your glance slide off me as though I were coated with oil. You look at other women quite efficiently, I notice.”

“If I look at you—”

“Then you’ll seem too interested and you’ll be embarrassed. But if you look hard, you’ll get used to it, and you’ll stop noticing. Look, I’ll stand still and you stare. I’ll take off my briefs.”

Denison groaned, “Selene, there are people all around and you’re making intolerable fun of me. Please keep walking and let me get used to the situation.”

“All right, but I hope you notice the people who pass us don’t look at us.”

“They don’t look at you. They look at me all right. They’ve probably never seen so old-looking and ill-shaped a person.”

“They probably haven’t,” agreed Selene, cheerfully, “but they’ll just have to get used to it.”

Denison walked on in misery, conscious of every gray hair on his chest and of every quiver of his paunch. It was only when the passageway thinned out and the people passing them were fewer in number that he began to feel a certain relief.

He looked about him curiously now, not as aware of Selene’s conical breasts as he had been, nor of her smooth thighs. The corridor seemed endless.

“How far have we come?” he asked.

“Are you tired?” Selene was contrite. “We could have taken a scooter. I forget you’re from Earth.”

“I should hope you do. Isn’t that the ideal for an immigrant? I’m not the least bit tired. Hardly the least bit tired at any rate. What I am is a little cold.”

“Purely your imagination, Ben,” said Selene, firmly. “You just think you ought to feel cold because so much of you is bare. Put it out of your head.”

“Easy to say,” he sighed. “I’m walking well, I hope.”

“Very well. I’ll have you kangarooing yet.”

“And participating in glider races down the surface slopes. Remember, I’m moderately advanced in years. But really, how far have we come?”

“Two miles, I should judge.”

“Good Lord! How many miles of corridors are there altogether?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know. The residential corridors make up comparatively little of the total. There are the mining corridors, the geological ones, the industrial, the mycological.... I’m sure there must be several hundred miles altogether.”

“Do you have maps?”

“Of course there are maps. We can’t work blind.”

“I mean you, personally.”

“Well, no, not with me, but I don’t need maps for this area; it’s quite familiar to me. I used to wander about here as a child. These are old corridors. Most of the new corridors—and we average two or three miles of new corridors a year, I think—are in the north. I couldn’t work my way through them, without a map, for untold sums. Maybe not even with a map.”

“Where are we heading?”

“I promised you an unusual sight—no, not me, so don’t say it—and you’ll have it. It’s the Moon’s most unusual mine and it’s completely off the ordinary tourist trails.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve got diamonds on the Moon?”

“Better than that.”

The corridor walls were unfinished here—gray rock, dimly but adequately lit by patches of electroluminescence. The temperature was comfortable and at a steady mildness, with ventilation so gently effective there was no sensation of wind. It was hard to tell here that a couple of hundred feet above was a surface subjected to alternate frying and freezing as the Sun came and went on its grand biweekly swing from horizon to horizon and then underneath and back.

“Is all this airtight?” asked Denison, suddenly uncomfortably aware that he was not far below the bottom of an ocean of vacuum that extended upward through all infinity.

“Oh, yes. Those walls are impervious. They’re all booby-trapped, too. If the air pressure drops as much as ten per cent in any section of the corridors there is such a hooting and howling from sirens as you have never heard and such a flashing of arrows and blazing of signs directing you to safety as you have never seen.”

“How often does this happen?”

“Not often. I don’t think anyone has been killed through air-lack for at least five years.” Then, with sudden defensiveness, “You have natural catastrophes on Earth. A big quake or a tidal wave can kill thousands.”

“No argument, Selene.” He threw up his hands. “I surrender.”

“All right,” she said. “I didn’t mean to get excited.... Do you hear that?”

She stopped, in an attitude of listening.

Denison listened, too, and shook his head. Suddenly, he looked around. “It’s so quiet. Where is everybody? Are you sure we’re not lost?”

“This isn’t a natural cavern with unknown passageways. You have those on Earth, haven’t you? I’ve seen photographs.”

“Yes, most of them are limestone caves, formed by water. That certainly can’t be the case of the Moon, can it?”

“So we can’t be lost,” said Selene, smiling. “If we’re alone, put it down to superstition.”

“To what?” Denison looked startled and his face creased in an expression of disbelief.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “You get all lined. That’s right. Smooth out. You look much better than you did when you first arrived, you know. That’s low gravity and exercise.”

“And trying to keep up with nude young ladies who have an uncommon amount of off-time and an uncommon lack of better things to do than to go on busmen’s holidays.”