Suddenly the colonel stiffened.

"Yes! Yes! I hear you!" he shouted. "You're what?... But that's crazy!... No! I order you not to—"

He tore the earphones from his head and dived for the tube leading to the radome.

White exchanged puzzled glances with the other two men watching, and then followed.

Markley was at the telescope, cranking handwheels, swinging the tube on its airtight joint. The large quartz port showed the moon, nearly full, just rising from the misty horizon. The instant White turned his eyes on it he saw the flash.

The searing, blue-white fire was like a glimpse of the sun. Then, from the tip of Mare Imbrium, from the mouth of that ancient pock-marked face, rose a bright plume of smoke.

"My God!" cried White. "He's blown himself up!"

Quite perceptibly the plume widened, its jet-black shadow crossing the moon's face like a sword-cut. Gradually it thickened at the top, still rising like a shining fountain in the sunlight. It was beautiful, but with a beauty surpassed for White by its horror.

"Why did he do it?" he groaned, trying to understand.

The spectacle possessed him even as he struggled against it. This was the moon-ship, all their work going up in a cloud of atomic dust! This was the accident they had all feared—and it hadn't been an accident!

Why?

Markley looked at him with a face that was old, but with eyes that were strangely bright and proud.

"If you don't know why, when you look at that," he said slowly, "you'll never know."

Then, stung to anger by White's blank face, he shouted, "Don't you see? He had to do something!"

Then, suddenly, White understood. Men like Markley and Jessup had fought against the indifference of men like himself for hundreds of years. Theirs was not a personal ambition. The buried moon-ship had been a deadly fizzle, a "so-what," a tainted success. This was a spectacle a billion people would see and feel—a miracle!

The man-made tree grew where nothing had ever grown before, its branches thickening and spreading, hiding the moon's face like a tantalizing veil.

 Prev. P 11/11