Sometime after that Stormalong got bored with demonstrating the new teleportation-motored atmosphere transports Desperation Defense was selling all over the galaxies and training pilots for, and he talked Jonnie into letting him rehabilitate an old company orbit miner with cranes and fly to the moon. Jonnie talked Stormalong into first getting some pressure suits and then getting three other pilots as crazy as Stormalong, refitting four orbit miners and doing it right.

Stormalong had the excuse that he wanted to go see whether he could find some more of that heavy metal.

He figured that flights of meteorites had now hit the moon. It took them two months to get ready and to make the trip and return.

They found the meteorites with heavy metal traces, all right, and mined them and brought back about two hundred tons of ore to process. But Stormalong brought back startling news:

“There's footprints up there,” he told

Jonnie. “And tire treads!”

This being in the world of tracking, Jonnie was very interested. They speculated on the possibility they had invaders. But the Desperation Defense people pooh-poohed it: nothing could get through their defenses. They then wondered if it might not have been the visitors putting down there during the war.

Jonnie wasn't going to spend weeks in space in an orbit miner so he chartered Dries Gloton's space yacht for a weekend and he and Stormalong were taken up to have another look.

Yessir! Footprints! Tire treads!

Then the sharp, trained eye of Jonnie spotted a paper wrapper that must have been discarded and lay almost covered with dust. It said “Carefree Sugarless Gum, Spearmint, 15 sticks, Life Savers, Inc., New York City.”

Stormalong thought it must be some salvage gear from a wreck maybe. But there was no wreck. Dries thought that maybe it was used to repair holes. Gum, you know.

Jonnie wouldn't let them mess up the tracks with their own. He picto-recorded them and then backtracked them and found a cairn with the very faded remains of what might have been a flag. Then, although he had trouble walking with almost no weight, he hiked around and found another cairn with another flag in it, also faded beyond recognition. That was all they found. But Jonnie showed them that the exposed edge of the wrapper was much more faded than the buried part and from that he deducted that these tracks and cairns were hundreds of years old. So they decided it was not an immediate danger and started back home.

The real discovery was made on the way back. Jonnie was admiring Dries' communication gear and Dries showed him the first pictures he had taken of the planet and Jonnie noticed there seemed to be much more cloud cover now.

He did more comparisons. They were flashing down toward Europe, of course, but they could still see northern Africa and the Middle East. The latter was green. And the former had a new sea in the middle of it.

Landed again, even though he was late for Sunday night supper, Jonnie got right onto the Desperation Defense duty officer and wanted to know if he was aware of planetary changes. He was and referred Jonnie to the general manager of Buildstrong.

“You ordered us to show a profit,” the general manager said defensively. “So we hired some more Chatovarians and started a Health Subsidiary. We figured 'Buildstrong' could also be interpreted to mean strong bodies.”

Jonnie wanted to know what the devil he had done now. And it seemed there was a below-sea-level spot in the dry wasteland of the Sahara Desert so they let the Mediterranean in and made a new sea that would furnish rainfall. And they had machine-gun-planted eighty-five quadrillion trees there, and also in the Middle East where they wouldn't require much water. Good varieties, slow growing, but very tasty. And they'd planted another sixteen quadrillion in the middle west of the American continent...oh, Jonnie hadn't seen that part of the continent? Well, there used to be trees on that huge, central, flat plain; they could prove it by fossil remains. Anyway, he was sorry if it had changed the climate. But it usually did, you know. Cleaned up the air, too.

Jonnie wanted to know how spending that much money and hiring that new army of Chatovarians was going to make a profit. And the general manager showed him the balance sheets now. They were all in the black. They were exporting food trees to food-short Chatovarian planets. Jonnie forgave him, raised his pay, and went home to a very late Sunday dinner.

Another incident worthy of note happened about that time.

Jonnie, wearing an extraterrestrial atmosphere mask to keep from being stopped on the street and gathering crowds, attended a fair in Zurich, and there he saw Pierre Solens. The ex-pilot was in beggar's rags and holding forth to an audience about how he personally, with his own eyes, had seen Jonnie Goodboy Tyler walk on a cloud and, not only that, pull a demon out of it and sing a duet with him. When he had finished his story, he passed around a battered cup for offerings. It seemed he made his living this way. When he got to Jonnie, Jonnie pulled his mask down and Pierre nearly fainted again.

There were so many exaggerations and lies going around about Jonnie that he figured he didn't need another one. So he forced Pierre into a plane, took him right down to Africa, and made him get into another plane at Victoria and by himself fly it up to the peak where the Psychlo cadavers still lay in the snow, land, look, fly back down through the overcast, and land. Pierre made it without wrecking himself and Jonnie took him back to Luxembourg. Pierre said “Thank you” and he meant it. He went back to his old job of moving the compound planes around the hangar and in time became an acceptable pilot.

There was a bizarre incident that occurred in Edinburgh. The sarcophagus of Bittie MacLeod had been miraculously preserved in the bombings: three beams of the collapsing cathedral had fallen across it almost protectively; the Chatovarians had repositioned it in the new cathedral crypt in a row of dead war heroes which included Glencannon's recovered remains.

When she was sixteen, Pattie demanded that she be taken to the crypt and married to Bittie MacLeod. Nothing could dissuade her and she stood there beside the sarcophagus in a white wedding dress, holding Bittie's locket with “To my future wife” on it. The parson, who could find no law against it, went through the wedding ceremony. She then changed to widow's weeds and after that called herself Mrs. Pattie MacLeod.

Still continuing with her medical training, she founded the MacLeod Intergalactic Health Organization. Jonnie funded it and it became a standard stop-point on and off all firing platforms throughout the galaxies. It also provided instant medical service.

Two other events had occurred. Jonnie and Chrissie had a boy born to them, Timmie Brave Tyler, an absolute carbon copy of Jonnie as everybody swore. And two years later they had a girl, Missie, that everyone affirmed was a mirror-image of Chrissie.

When Timmie was six, Jonnie blew up. Their boy was not getting properly educated. He had “uncles” by the absolute score. “Uncle” Colonel Ivan, “Uncle” Sir Robert, “Uncle” Dunneldeen. And every Scot who had mined or served with Jonnie was an “uncle.” They spoiled the child rotten. They brought him things from all over the world. But were they seeing to it that Timmie was properly educated? No! He did speak several languages after a fashion– Russian, Chinese,

Chatovarian, Psychlo, and English. He could do sums in his head when it suited him. And he could drive a teleportation go-cart Angus and Tom Smiley had made for him. But Jonnie was faced with the specter of a son who would grow up totally ignorant of the vital things in life.

Jonnie had made up his mind. Affairs were running fine– handled mostly by others anyway. So he took a few bare necessities, bundled Timmie and