moon."

"Uh-huh," said Pell.

Kronski sipped his coffee loudly. A few slender, graceful young men from
World Commerce looked at him distastefully. "Happened just this year.
New Year they all went over. Augea, in the Hercules Mountains. Big
celebration."

Pell looked up and said, "Wait a minute...."

"Wait for what? I'm not goin' anywhere. Not on this swivel-chair of a
job, damn it."

"New Year they all become Supremists. And the last week of December
everybody on the moon gets his inoculations, right?"

"Search me."

"But I know that. I found that out when I was tailing those two gamblers
who had a place on the moon, remember?"

"So it may be a connection." Kronski shrugged.

"It may be the place where we can study a bunch of these cases in a
batch instead of picking 'em one by one."

"You mean we oughta take a trip to the moon?"

"Might not hurt for a few days."

Kronski was grinning at him.

"What are you grinning at?"

"First you got to stay over on your vacation, so you can't go to the
moon with your wife. Now all of a sudden you decide duty has got to take
you to the moon, huh?"

Pell grinned back then. "What are you squawking about? You said you
wanted to get out on this case."

Kronski, still grinning, got up. "I'm not complaining. I'm just
demonstrating my powers of deduction, as they say in teleplays. Come on,
let's go make rocket reservations."

Chapter III

The big tourist rocket let them down at the Endymion Crater Landing, and
they went through the usual immigration and customs formalities in the
underground city there. They stayed in a hotel overnight, Pell and Ciel
looking very much like tourists, Kronski tagging along and looking
faintly out of place. In the morning--morning according to the 24 hour
earth clock, that is--they took the jitney rocket to the resort town of
Augea, in the Hercules Mountains. The town was really a cliff dwelling,
built into the side of a great precipice with quartz windows overlooking
a tremendous, stark valley.

It was hard to say just what attraction the moon had as a vacation land,
and it was a matter of unfathomable taste. You either liked it, or you
didn't. If you didn't, you couldn't understand what people who liked it
saw in it. They couldn't quite explain. "It's so quiet. It's so vast.
It's so beautiful," they'd say, but never anything clearer than that.

[Illustration]

Augea itself was like twenty other resorts scattered throughou