very well to write a "Primer of the Atom," but you just can't make nuclear physics as easy to understand as a ball game. But I'll try to explain what Andersen meant.

There were, until the early 1940's, ninety-two elements in nature. They ran from hydrogen up to uranium, from atomic Number One to Ninety-two. Those elements made up everything in nature. Mendelieff had neatly arranged them in his periodic table and there just weren't any more.

Then they got to bombarding uranium with neutrons to create the uranium fission on which atomic energy is based. And they found that one isotope of uranium would absorb a neutron and then eject an electron. That stepped up its atomic number, the number of charges in its nucleus, from ninety-two to ninety-three. And that meant it wasn't uranium any longer but a brand-new element, neptunium.

Neptunium was boosted up naturally by the same process to atomic Number Ninety-four, and so we had plutonium. And then in 1946 the University of California scientists started the job of trying to add carbon, Number Six, to uranium, to make another new element—Number Ninety-eight.

You see what had happened? For the first time in history, the "normal" range of ninety-two elements had been extended. New elements, transuranic elements, had been created such as had never appeared at all naturally. They were a totally artificial new kind of matter.

Of course, the atomic physicists didn't stop there. They kept up the boosting process to create more new transuranic elements. By 1960 they had run the transuranic elements clear up to Number One-twenty-eight. Of course, many of them were unstable and could be kept in existence only under special conditions. And after the Cambridge disaster, the Commission got a little nervous about the whole business.

That's why they had established Transuranic Station up here on the Moon where a blow-up wouldn't harm anybody—except scientists. The rocket boys had got to the Moon before 1951 and had found it wasn't good for much else but such a station. So it had been built here on the face of the flat Mare Imbrium.

The "Dome" was what we called the central living quarters. For safety in emergency it had forty-foot walls that could stop any radiation ever heard of. The labs were grouped loosely around it like planets around a sun, connected by sealed underground tunnels. The big atomic piles and separation "canyons" ran off underground, with full remote-control 

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