mile. "Though
some facts will be unavoidably obvious to you, working here. But at
least I will let you figure them out for yourselves, since you are
well-informed young men, by your own statement." Here Rodan looked hard
at the pale, unsteady Lester. "We will go back, now, so I can show you
the camp, its routine, and your place in it. We have three domes--garden
and living quarters, with a workshop and supply dome between them..."

Quarters proved to be okay--two bunks and the usual compact accessories.

"Leave your Archers in the lockers outside your door--here are your
keys," Rodan suggested. "Helen will have a meal ready for you in the
adjacent dining room. Afterwards, take a helpful tranquilizer, and
sleep. No work until you awaken. I shall leave you, now..."

It was a good meal--steak cultured and grown in a nourishing solution,
on the Moon, perhaps at Serene, much as Dr. Alexis Carrel had long ago
grown and kept for years a living fragment of a chicken's heart.
Potatoes, peas and tomatoes, too--all had become common staples in
hydroponic gardens off the Earth.

"What do you make of what Rodan was talking about, Les?" Frank asked
conversationally.

But David Lester was lost and vague, his food almost untouched. "I--I
don't know!" he stammered.

Scared and embittered further by this bad sign, Frank turned to Helen.
"And how are you?" he asked hopefully.

"I am all right," she answered, without a trace of encouragement.

She was in jeans, maybe she was eighteen, maybe she was Rodan's
daughter. Her face was as reddened as a peasant's. It was hard to tell
that she was a girl at all. She wasn't a girl. It was soon plain that
she was a zombie with about ten words in her vocabulary. How could a
girl have gotten to this impossible region, anyway?

Now Frank tried to delay Lester's inevitable complete crackup by
encouraging his interest in their situation.

"It's big, Les," he said. "It's got to be! An expedition came here to
investigate the Moon--it couldn't be any more recently than sixty
million years ago, if it was from as close as Mars, or the Asteroid
Planet! Two adjacent worlds were competing, then, the scientists know.
Both were smaller than the Earth, cooled faster, bore life sooner. Which
sent the party? I saw where there rocket ship must have stood--a glassy,
spot where the dust was once fused!... From all the markings, they must
have been around for months. Nowhere else on the Moon--that I ever heard