ar-shaped
mass of ink which was quite the size of a large grape before it fell
into his waste-basket. It was the largest he'd made to date. It
fell--slow-motion--and splashed--violently--as he regarded it with
harried satisfaction.

More time passed. A moon-rocket arrived from Earth. There were new
tourists under the thousand-foot plastic dome. Out by the former
Mars-ship Jones made experiments with small plastic balloons coated with
a conducting varnish. In a vacuum, a cubic inch of air at Earth-pressure
will expand to make many cubic feet of near-vacuum. If a balloon can
sustain an internal pressure of one ounce to the square foot, a
thimbleful of air will inflate a sizeable globe to that pressure. Jones
was arranging tiny Dabney field robot-generators with tiny atomic
batteries to power them. Each such balloon would be a Dabney field
"plate" when cast adrift in emptiness, and its little battery would keep
it in operation for twenty years or more.

Baggage came up from Earth for Johnny Simms. It was mostly elephant-guns
and ammunition for them. Johnny, as the heir to innumerable millions
back on earth, had had a happy life, but hardly one to give him a
practical view of things. To him, star-travel meant landing on such
exotic planets as the fictioneers had been writing about for a hundred
years or so. He really looked upon the venture into space as a combined
big-game expedition and escape from Lunar City. And he did look forward,
too, to freedom from his family's legal representative and the constant
reminder of ethical and moral values which Johnny preferred happily to
ignore.

Film-tape came up, and cameras to use it in. Every imaginable item an
expedition to space could use or even might use, was thrust upon
Spaceways, Inc. Manufacturers yearned to have their products used in
connection with the hottest news story in decades. There was a steady
trailing of moon-jeeps from the airlocks of Lunar City to the ship.

The time of lunar sunset arrived--503:30 o'clock, half-past five hundred
and three hours. Time was measured from midnight to midnight,
astronomical fashion. The great, blazing sun whose streamer prominences,
even, were too bright to be looked at with the naked eye--the sun neared
and reached the horizon. There was no change in the star-studded sky.
There were no sunset colorings. The incandescent brightness on the
mountains was not lessened in the least. Only the direction of the stark
black shadows s