And maybe I’m a hero again, he thought as he knocked evenly on the door to Sims’s office. Maybe down there the world is once more reading about, me daily. He hadn’t listened to a news broadcast since the night before his first trip to the ship. Had the story been released to the public yet? He couldn’t see any reason why it should be suppressed, but that seldom was important. He would ask Sims. Sims would know.

The door opened and Reynolds went inside. Sims was a huge man who wore his black hair in a crew cut. The style had been out of fashion for thirty or forty years; Reynolds doubted then; was another crew cut man in the universe. But he could not imagine Sims any other way.

“What’s wrong?” Sims asked, guessing accurately the first time. He led Reynolds to a chair and sat him down. The office was big but empty. A local phone sat upon the desk along with a couple of daily status reports. Sims was assistant administrative chief, whatever that meant. Reynolds had never understood the functions of the position, if any. But there was one thing that was clear: Sims knew more about the inner workings of the moon base than any other man. And that included the director as well.

“I want to know about Vonda,” Reynolds said. With Sims, everything stood on a first-name basis. Vonda was Vonda Kelly. The name tasted strangely upon Reynolds’ lips. “Why isn’t she eating at the cafeteria?”

Sims answered unhesitantly. “Because she’s afraid to leave her desk.”

“It has something to do with the aliens?”

“It does, but I shouldn’t tell you what. She doesn’t want you to know.”

“Tell me. Please.” His desperation cleared the smile from Sims’s lips. And he had almost added: for old times’ sake. He was glad he had controlled himself.

“The main reason is the war,” Sims said. “If it starts, she wants to know at once.”

“Will it?”

Sims shook his head. “I’m smart but I’m not God. As usual, I imagine everything will work out as long as no one makes a stupid mistake. The worst will be a small local war lasting maybe a month. But how long can you depend upon politicians to act intelligently? It goes against the grain with them.”

“But what about the aliens?”

“Well, as I said, that’s part of it too.” Sims stuck his pipe in his mouth. Reynolds had never seen it lit, never seen hum smoking it, but the pipe was invariable there between his teeth. “A group of men are coming here from Washington, arriving tomorrow. They want to talk with your pets. It seems nobody-least of all Vonda-is very happy with your progress.”

“I am.”

Sims shrugged, as if to say: that is of no significance.

“The aliens will never agree to see them,” Reynolds said.

“How are they going to stop them? Withdraw the welcome mat? Turn out the lights? That won’t work.”

“But that will ruin everything. All my work up until now.”

“What work?” Sims got up and walked around his desk until he stood hovering above Reynolds. “As far as anybody can see, you haven’t accomplished a damn thing since you went up there. People want results, Bradley, not a lot of noise. All you’ve given anyone is the noise. This isn’t a private game of yours. This is one of the most significant events in the history of the human race. If anyone ought to know that, it’s you. Christ.” And he wandered back to his chair again, jiggling his pipe.

“What is it they want from me?” Reynolds said. “Look-I got them what they asked for. The aliens have agreed to let a team of scientists study their ship. “

“We want more than that now. Among other things, we want an alien to come down and visit Washington. Think of the propaganda value of than, and right now is a time when we damn well need something like that. Here we are, the only country with sense enough to stay on the moon. And being here has finally paid off in a way the politicians can understand. They’ve given you a month in which to play around-after all, you’re a hero and the publicity is good-but how much longer do you expect them to wait? No, they want action and I’m afraid they want it now.”

Reynolds was ready to go. He had found out as much as he was apt to find here. And he already knew what he was going to have to do. He would go and find Kelly and tell her she had to keep the men from Earth away from the aliens. If she wouldn’t agree, then he would go up and tell the aliens and they would leave for the sun. But what if Kelly wouldn’t let him go? He had to consider that. He knew; he would tell her this: If you don’t let me see them, if you try to keep me away, they’ll know something is wrong and they’ll leave without a backward glance. Maybe he could tell her the aliens were telepaths; he doubted she would know any better.

He had the plan all worked out so that it could not fail.

He had his hand on the doorknob when Sims called him back. “There’s another thing I better tell you, Bradley.”

“All right. What’s that?”

“Vonda. She’s on your side. She told them to stay away, but it wasn’t enough. She’s been relieved of duty. A replacement is coming with the others.”

“Oh,” said Reynolds.

Properly suited, Reynolds sat in the cockpit of the shuttle tug watching the pilot beside him going through the ritual of a final inspection prior to take-off. The dead desolate surface of the moon stretched briefly away from where the tug sat, the horizon so near that it almost looked touchable. Reynolds liked the moon. If he had not, he would never have elected to return here to stay. It was the Earth he hated. Better than the moon was space itself, the dark endless void beyond the reach of man’s ugly grasping hands. That was where Reynolds was going now. Up. Out. Into the void. He was impatient to leave.

The pilot’s voice came to him softly through the suit radio, a low murmur, not loud enough for him to understand what the man was saying. The pilot was talking to himself as he worked, using the rumble of his own voice as a way of patterning his mind so that it would not lose concentration. The pilot was a young man in his middle twenties, probably on loan from the Air Force, a lieutenant or, at most, a junior Air Force captain. He was barely old enough to remember when space had really been a frontier. Mankind had decided to go out, and Reynolds had been one of the men chosen to take the giant steps, but now it was late-the giant steps of twenty years ago were mere tentative contusions in the dust of the centuries-and man was coming back. From where he sat, looking out, Reynolds could see exactly 50 percent of the present American space program: the protruding bubble of the moon base. The other half was the orbiting space lab that circled the Earth itself, a battered relic of the expansive seventies. Well beyond the nearby horizon maybe a hundred miles away-there had once been another bubble, but it was gone now. The brave men who had lived and worked and struggled and died and survived there-they were all gone too. Where? The Russians still maintained an orbiting space station, so some of their former moon colonists were undoubtedly there, but where were the rest? In Siberia? Working there? Hadn’t the Russians decided that Siberia-the old barless prison state of the czars and early Communists-was a more practical frontier than the moon?

And weren’t they maybe right? Reynolds did not like to think so, for he had poured his life into this-into the moon and the void beyond. But at times, like now, peering through the artificial window of his suit, seeing the bare bubble of the base clinging to the edge of this dead world like a wart on an old woman’s face, starkly vulnerable, he found it hard to see the point of it. He was an old enough man to recall the first time he had ever been moved by the spirit of conquest. As a schoolboy, he remembered the first time men conquered Mount Everest-it was around 1956 or ‘57-and he had religiously followed the newspaper reports. Afterward, a movie had been made, and watching that film, seeing the shadows of pale mountaineers clinging to the edge of that white god, he had decided that was what he wanted to be. And he had never been taught otherwise: only by the time he was old enough to act, all the mountains had long since been conquered. And he had ended up as an astronomer, able if nothing else to gaze outward at the distant shining peaks of the void, and from there he had been pointed toward space. So he had gone to Mars and become famous, but fame had turned him inward, so that now, without the brilliance of his past, he would have been nobody but another of those anonymous old men who dot the cities of the world, inhabiting identically bleak book-lined rooms, eating daily in bad restaurants, their minds always a billion miles away from the dead shells of their bodies.