Andersen looked at him earnestly. "You understand, Ramon? It needs strength. We must help It."

"I understand a little," said Varez, taking the Dane's arm. He walked with him toward the door. "I want you to explain it to me."

And then Varez' good work was nearly undone by Doctor Cubbison. He stood in the door, and his high, rasping voice complained.

"Really, Doctor Andersen, I am surprised at your absurd suggestion! I really feel I must report this to the Commission."

"That will be enough," said Varez in his soft voice, and yet there was something in it that shut Cubbison up at once.

But when Varez and Andersen had gone, Cubbison started again.

"This new radiation must be shielded off at once!" he fussed. "See to it immediately, Doctor Laurent! I'll report to New York."

It was like him, that order. It was like him to order Marie to devise instantly a shield for a radiation that no one before had dreamed to exist. But she silently started making capture cross-section tests of various shielding materials, by the remote-control.

By that "evening"—we kept Earth time at the Station—the radiation from Element One-forty-four was still a mystery. It was still leaking out of that chamber, though of course even it couldn't enter the Dome. Marie and Burris had been making their capture cross-sections all day.

Zarias was badly upset, at dinner that night in the Dome. He was upset because this new radiation had suddenly cut the ground from under all the physics he knew so well.

"We're exactly where the Curies and Rutherford were fifty years ago!" he kept saying. "We're on the brink of unexplored territory!"

Marie Laurent was silent at dinner, and afterward I saw her go up the stair to the lookout. I followed and found her gazing out of the filter-windows at the glaring, ghastly desert of the Mare Imbrium over which swung the dull green shield of Earth.

They say that when a man reports for duty at Transuranic Station he spends his whole first day peering raptly from the lookout, and then never goes up there again. It's nearly the truth—the novelty of being on the Moon wears off fast, when nothing out there ever changes.

Marie turned around and smiled at me. "You might have waited long enough to make 

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