“Opperly said—” Paul began…and realized that Doc was speaking to him.

“Excuse me, you two in the back row — sorry, I don’t know your names — do you have a contribution to make?”

“Why, no. No, sir,” Paul called rapidly. “We were simply very much impressed by your presentation.”

Doc waved his hand once in a good-natured acknowledgment.

“Liar,” Margo breathed at Paul with a smile. “I’ve half a mind to tell him all about it.”

Paul hadn’t the heart to say no, which was probably a good thing. He was having another guilt attack, unlocalized but acute. Certainly, he told himself, he couldn’t spill inside Project information — to saucerites, to boot. Still, there was something wrong with a setup in which someone like Doc couldn’t know about those photographs.

But then he started thinking about the point at issue, and the shiver returned. Damn it, there was something devilish about the way Doc’s guesswork fitted with those photographs. He looked up urieasily at the dark moon. Margo’s words resounded thinly in his memory: “What if the stars around it should squiggle now?”

The moon-dust cannisters hanging on their thin metal stalks above the dimly glittering film of carbon dioxide snow looked like the weirdly mechanistic fruits of an ice garden. Moving in his helmet’s headlight beam, Don Merriam stepped toward the nearest one as gently as he could, so as to kick up a minimum of contaminating dust. In spite of his caution, some dry-ice crystals arched up in the path of his metal boots and fell back abruptly, as is the way of dust and “snow” on the airless moon. He touched the trigger on the cannister which sealed it hermetically and then he plucked it from its stalk and dropped it in his pouch.

“Highest-paid fruit picker this side of Mars,” he told himself judicially. “And even at that I’m finishing this job too fast to suit Union Czar Gompert, the Slow-Down King.”

He looked back up at the black earth inside the bronze ring. “Ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent of them,” he told himself, “would agree I’m featherbedding. They think all space exploration is the biggest featherbed since the Pyramids. Or the railroads, anyhow. Air-clams! Troposphere-barnacles!” He grinned. “They’ve heard about space but they still don’t believe in it. They haven’t been out here to see for themselves that there isn’t any giant elephant under the earth, holding it up, and a giant tortoise holding up the elephant. If I say ‘planet’ and ‘spaceship’ to them, they still think “horoscope’ and ‘flying saucer’.”

As he turned toward the next cannister-bearing reed, his boot scuffed the crystal film, and a faint creaky whir traveled up the leg of his suit. It was an echo, from across the years, of his galoshes singing against the crusty Minnesota snow on a zero day.

Barbara Katz said, “Hey, check me, Mr. Kettering — I see a white light flashing near Copernicus.”

Knolls Kettering III, creaking a bit at the joints, took her place at the eyepiece. “You’re right, Miss Katz,” he said. “The Soviets must be testing signal flares, I imagine.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I never trust myself on moon-stuff — I keep seeing the lights of Luna City and Leyport and all the other science-fiction places.”

“Confidentially, Miss Katz, so do I! Now there’s a red flare.”

“Oh, could I see it? — But I hate making you get up and down. I could sit on your lap, if you wouldn’t mind — and if the stool would stand it.”

Knolls Kettering III chuckled regretfully. “I wouldn’t mind, and the stool might stand it, but I’m afraid the bone-plastic splice in my hip mightn’t.”

“Oh, gee, I’m sorry.”

“Forget it, Miss Katz — we’re fellow lensmen. And don’t feel sorry for me.”

“I won’t,” she assured him. “Why, I think it’s romantic being patched up that way, just like the old soldiers that run the space academies in the Heinlein and E. E. Smith stories.”

Don Guillermo Walker finally had to admit to himself that the black glisten ahead was water — and the little lake, rather than the big one, for there at last were the lights of Managua twinkling no more than ten miles away. A new worry struck him: that he had cut his timing too fine. What if the moon came out of eclipse right now, pinpointing him for el presidente’s jets and AA guns, like a premature spotlight catching a stagehand in overalls making a dark-stage scenery change? He wished he were back doing second-rate summer stock near Chicago, or haranguing a “guns-south” Birch splinter group; or ten years old and putting on a backyard circus in Milwaukee, defying death by sliding down a slanting rusty wire from a height of nineteen feet.

That second memory gave him courage. Dead for a backyard circus…dead for a greaser city bombed! He revved the motor to its top speed, and the prop behind him drummed the lukewarm air a shade less feebly. “Guil-ler-mo ge-ron-imo!” Don Guillermo yelled. “La Loma, here I come!”

Chapter Seven

Paul Hagbolt was paying only half attention to the speakers on the platform. The coincidence of the star photos and Doc’s notion about planets traveling through hyperspace had distracted him and set his imagination drifting. As if a big clock, that only he could hear, had just now begun to tick (once a second, not five times like wrist watches and many spring clocks), he found himself becoming acutely aware of time and of everything around him — the huddled group of people, the level sand, the faint rattle of the toppling wavelets just beyond the speakers, the old, boarded-up beach houses, the hooded and red-blinking installations of Vandenberg Two thrusting up behind him, the dirt cliffs beyond the sea-grass, above all the mild night pressing in from the ends of space and making tiny everything but the globe of Earth and the dark moon and the glittering stars.

Someone addressed a question to Rama Joan. She smiled with her teeth at Beardy and then looked down at her audience, her gaze moving to each member in turn. The bulging green turban hid her hair, though she had the same pale complexion as Ann, and it emphasized the tapering of her thin face. She looked like a half-starved child herself.

Still without speaking, she gazed across the heavens and above her shoulder at the dark moon, then back at her audience.

Then she said very quietly, yet harshly: “What do any of us really know about what is out there? Far less than a man imprisoned from birth in a cell under the city would know of the millions in Calcutta or Hong Kong or Moscow or New York. I know some of you think advanced races will love and cherish us, but I judge the attitude of more advanced races toward man on the basis of man’s attitude toward the ant. On that basis I can tell you this much: there are devils out there. Devils.”

There was a low, grinding sound like steel clockwork being wound. Miaow stiffened in Margo’s arms, and the short hairs rose along her spine. Ragnarok had growled.

Rama Joan continued: “Among the stars, out there, there may be Hindus who won’t kill a cow and even Jains who whisk off whatever they sit on for fear of crushing an ant and who wear gauze over their lips to keep from swallowing a gnat, but those will be at most the rare exceptions. The rest will not strain at gnats. To us, they will be devils.”

Weirdness engulfed Paul. Everything around him seemed much too real, yet on the verge of dissolution — frozen, phantasmal. He looked toward the stars and the moon for support, telling himself that the heavens were the one thing that hadn’t changed through all history, but then a demon voice deep in his mind said: “But what if the stars should move? They moved, in the photographs.”

Sally Harris led Jake Lesher across the worn wood platform to the fifth and last car of the Rocket train. The only other passengers this trip were a rather timid-looking Puerto Rican couple, sitting in the first car and already gripping the safety bar with all four hands.