job scout.

"Then I'll sign."

"Excellent... You, too, guy?" The scout was looking at Frank. "And your
other friends?"

"I'm thinking about it," Frank answered cagily. "Some of them aren't
stopping on the Moon, as you can see."

Mitch Storey was lashing a few flasks of oxygen and water to the rim of
his bubb, being careful to space them evenly for static balance. He
didn't have the money to buy much more, even here.

The Kuzaks were preparing two huge bundles of supplies, which they
intended to tow. Reynolds was also loading up a few things, with
Two-and-Two helping him.

"I'm all set, Frank!" Two-and-Two shouted. "I'm going along with
Charlie, maybe to crash the Venus exploration party!"

"Good!" Frank shouted back, glad that this large, unsure person had
found himself a leader.

Now he looked at Gimp Hines, riding the spinning rim of his ring with
his good and bad leg dangling, an expectant, quizzical, half-worried
look on his freckled face.

But Dave Lester was more pathetic. He had stopped the rotation of his
bubb. He looked down first at the pitted, jagged face of the Moon, with
an expression in which rapture and terror may have been mingled, glanced
with the hope of desperation toward the job scout, and then distractedly
continued dismantling the rigging of his vehicle, as if to repack it in
the blastoff drum for a landing.

"Hey--hold on, Les!" Two-and-Two shouted. "You gotta know where you're
going, first!"

"Make up your mind, Nelsen," said the job scout, getting impatient. "We
handle just about everything lunar--except in the Tovie areas. Without
us, you're just a lost, fresh punk!"

But another man had approached from another lunar GO rocket, which had
just appeared. He had a thin intellectual face, dark eyes, trap mouth,
white hair, soft speech that was almost shy.

"I'm Xavier Rodan," he said. "I search out my own employees. I do
minerals survey--for gypsum, bauxite--anything. And site survey, for
factories and other future developments. I also have connections with
the Selenographic Institute of the University of Chicago. It is all
interesting work, but in a rather remote region, I'm afraid--the far
side of the Moon. And I can pay only three hundred a week. Of course you
can resign whenever you wish. Perhaps you'd be interested--Mr. Nelsen,
is it?"

Frank had an impulse to jump at the chance--though there was a warning
coming to him from somewhere. But how could you ever know? You would