n, Kasten, Hopkins and
Fallowe, in my person, has been mobilized and sent up to the moon?"

Bill Holden swallowed. He stood up with his eyes closed, holding onto a
side-rail in the great central room of the platform.

"I have to keep my eyes shut," he explained, queasily. "It makes me ill
to see people walking on side-walls and across ceilings."

A stout tourist was doing exactly that at the moment. If one could walk
anywhere at all with magnetic-soled shoes, one could walk everywhere.
The stout man did walk up the side-wall. He adventured onto the ceiling,
where he was head-down to the balance of his party. He stood there
looking up--down--at them, and he wore a peculiarly astonished and
half-frightened and wholly foolish grin. His wife squealed for him to
come down: that she couldn't bear looking at him so.

"All right," said Cochrane. "You're keeping your eyes closed. But I'm
supposed to take orders from you. What sort of orders are you going to
give?"

"I'm not sure yet," said Holden thinly. "We are sent up here on a
private job for Hopkins--one of your bosses. Hopkins has a daughter.
She's married to a man named Dabney. He's neurotic. He's made a great
scientific discovery and it isn't properly appreciated. So you and I and
your team of tame scientists--we're on our way to the Moon to save his
reason."

"Why save his reason?" asked Cochrane cynically. "If it makes him happy
to be a crackpot--"

"It doesn't," said Holden, with his eyes still closed. He gulped. "Your
job and a large part of my practice depends on keeping him out of a
looney-bin. It amounts to a public-relations job, a production, with me
merely censoring aspects that might be bad for Dabney's psyche.
Otherwise he'll be frustrated."

"Aren't we all?" demanded Cochrane. "Who in hades does he think he is?
Most of us want appreciation, but we have to be glad when we do our work
and get paid for it! We--"

Then he swore bitterly. He had been taken off the job he'd spent years
learning to do acceptably, to phoney a personal satisfaction for the
son-in-law of one of the partners of the firm he worked for. It was
humiliation to be considered merely a lackey who could be ordered to
perform personal services for his boss, without regard to the damage to
the work he was really responsible for. It was even more humiliating to
know he had to do it because he couldn't afford not to.

Babs appeared, obviously gloating over the mere fact that she was
wa