e moon-jeep climbed and
climbed. It was a mile above the bay of the lava sea and the dust-heaps
that were a city. It looked like ten miles, because of the curve of the
horizon. The mountains all about looked like a madman's dream.

"But he wants appreciation!" said Holden angrily. "People on Earth
almost trampling on each other for lack of room, and people like me
trying to keep them sane when they've every reason for despair--and he
wants appreciation!"

Cochrane grinned. He whistled softly.

"Never underestimate a genius, Bill," he said kindly. "I refer modestly
to myself. In two weeks your patient--I'll guarantee it--will be
acclaimed the hope, the blessing, the greatest man in all the history of
humanity! It'll be phoney, of course, but we'll have Marilyn
Winters--Little Aphrodite herself--making passes at him in hopes of a
publicity break! It's a natural!"

"How'll you do it?" demanded Holden.

The moon-jeep turned in its crazy, bumping progress. A flat area had
been blasted in rock which had been unchanged since the beginning of
time. Here there was a human structure. Typically, it was a dust-heap
leaning against a cliff. There was an airlock and another jeep waited
outside, and there were eccentric metal devices on the flat space,
shielded from direct sunshine and with cables running to them from the
airlock door.

"How?" repeated Cochrane. "I'll get the details here. Let's go! How do
we manage?"

It was a matter, he discovered, of vacuum-suits, and they were tricky to
get into and felt horrible when one was in. Struggling, Cochrane thought
to say:

"You can wait here in the jeep, Babs--"

But she was already climbing into a suit very much oversized for her,
with the look of high excitement that Cochrane had forgotten anybody
could wear.

They got out of a tiny airlock that held just one person at a time. They
started for the laboratory. And suddenly Cochrane saw Babs staring
upward through the dark, almost-opaque glass that a space-suit-helmet
needs in the moon's daytime if its occupant isn't to be fried by
sunlight. Cochrane automatically glanced up too.

He saw Earth. It hung almost in mid-sky. It was huge. It was gigantic.
It was colossal. It was four times the diameter of the moon as seen from
Earth, and it covered sixteen times as much of the sky. Its continents
were plain to see, and its seas, and the ice-caps at its poles gleamed
whitely, and over all of it there was a faintly bluish haze w