satellite, of course, moved much too fast for any astronomer to hope to pick it up either visually or on a photographic plate.

On the day of the second satellite's announcement, Murfree assigned half the stock in Ocean Products, Inc., to a trust-fund for Bud Gregory and his family. That day, Bud Gregory stayed home and dozed beside a portable radio. It was raining too hard for him to go fishing.

The third and fourth new satellites—periods of 1 hr. 19 min., 12 sec., and 3 hr. 5 min., 42 sec. respectively—were discovered only two days apart. The fifth was found two days later, and the sixth and seventh were spotted within an hour of each other, when they were in conjunction and only five hundred miles apart, 7500 and 8000 miles up.

Murfree was very busy around this time. He had a gadget that Bud Gregory had made, and it couldn't be patented, and it couldn't be talked about, but it needed to be used. So he was getting Ocean Products, Inc., a mail address in New York and a stretch of ocean frontage on the Maryland coastline. He was having painful conferences with high-priced lawyers—whose point of view was as remote from that of a scientist as possible—and with low-priced electrical-installation men. He was run ragged. But Bud Gregory was sitting in the sun out on the Pacific coast, in blissful somnolence and doing nothing whatever.

Nobody suspected anything menacing in the existence of seven hitherto unsuspected and still invisible moons. Popular songs were written about them, radio programs exhaustively exploited them for gags, they were worked into three comic strips, and they headed for oblivion. But they did not reach it. When first danger was traced to them, Murfree did not hear about it for a time because he was painstakingly setting up Ocean Products, Inc., as a going concern which would pay taxes and comply with all laws, and give out no information about its dealings to anybody. Bud Gregory was living a life of placid, unambitious uselessness.

The first indication that the moons might be other than merely captured meteorites came when a graph appeared in an astronomical journal, tracing their orbits. Their orbits were at very odd angles, not at all near the plane of the ecliptic. They criss-crossed and overlapped, and at least one of them passed very nearly overhead above every spot of the earth's surface every twenty-four hours. The arrangement was too perfect and too exact to be chance. It was design. The moons were not meteorites following paths dictated by the circumstances of their capture. 

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