'd covered the unforgivable blunder, though not easily, and now
we could get down to the real business of the project. You know, of
course, about the A-bomb, H-bomb and C-bomb because information that
they existed had been declassified. You don't know about the other
weapons being devised--and neither did we, reasonably enough, since they
weren't our business--but we had been given properly guarded
notification that they were in the works. Project Hush was set up to
counter the new weapons.

Our goal was not just to reach the Moon. We had done that on 24 June
1967 with an unmanned ship that carried instruments to report back data
on soil, temperature, cosmic rays and so on. Unfortunately, it was put
out of commission by a rock slide.

An unmanned rocket would be useless against the new weapons. We had to
get to the Moon before any other country did and set up a permanent
station--an armed one--and do it without anybody else knowing about it.

I guess you see now why we on (_damn_ the name!) Project Hush were so
concerned about security. But we felt pretty sure, before we took off,
that we had plugged every possible leak.

We had, all right. Nobody even knew we had raised ship.

* * * * *

We landed at the northern tip of Mare Nubium, just off Regiomontanus,
and, after planting a flag with appropriate throat-catching ceremony,
had swung into the realities of the tasks we had practiced on so many
dry runs back on Earth. Major Monroe Gridley prepared the big rocket,
with its tiny cubicle of living space, for the return journey to Earth
which he alone would make.

Lieutenant-colonel Thomas Hawthorne painstakingly examined our
provisions and portable quarters for any damage that might have been
incurred in landing.

And I, Colonel Benjamin Rice, first commanding officer of Army Base No.
1 on the Moon, dragged crate after enormous crate out of the ship on my
aching academic back, and piled them in the spot two hundred feet away
where the plastic dome would be built.

We all finished at just about the same time, as per schedule, and went
into Phase Two.

Monroe and I started work on building the dome. It was a simple pre-fab
affair, but big enough to require an awful lot of assembling. Then,
after it was built, we faced the real problem--getting all the complex
internal machinery in place and in operating order.

Meanwhile, Tom Hawthorne took his plump self off in the single-seater