ce Laboratory Number 5, known more familiarly as Wheel
Five.

Wheel Five circled the Moon. There was an elaborate base on the surface
of the Moon in this year 1981. There were laboratories and observatories
there, too. But it had been found that the alternating fortnights of
boiling heat and near-absolute-zero cold on the lunar surface could play
havoc with the delicate instruments used in certain researches. Hence
Wheel Five had been built and was staffed by research men who were
rotated at regular eight-month intervals.

* * * * *

Kieran loved it, from the first. He thought that that was because of the
sheer beauty of it, the gaunt, silver deaths-head of the Moon forever
turning beneath, the still and solemn glory of the undimmed stars, the
filamentaries stretched across the distant star-clusters like shining
veils, the quietness, the peace.

But Kieran had a certain intellectual honesty, and after a while he
admitted to himself that neither the beauty nor the romance of it was
what made this life so attractive to him. It was the fact that he was
far away from Earth. He did not even have to look at Earth, for nearly
all geophysical research was taken care of by Wheels Two and Three that
circled the mother planet. He was almost completely divorced from all
Earth's problems and people.

Kieran liked people, but had never felt that he understood them. What
seemed important to them, all the drives of ordinary day-to-day
existence, had never seemed very important to him. He had felt that
there must be something wrong with him, something lacking, for it seemed
to him that people everywhere committed the most outlandish follies,
believed in the most incredible things, were swayed by pure
herd-instinct into the most harmful courses of behavior. They could not
all be wrong, he thought, so he must be wrong--and it had worried him.
He had taken partial refuge in pure science, but the study and then the
teaching of astrophysics had not been the refuge that Wheel Five was. He
would be sorry to leave the Wheel when his time was up.

And he was sorry, when the day came. The others of the staff were
already out in the docking lock in the rim, waiting to greet the
replacements from the ferry. Kieran, hating to leave, lagged behind.
Then, realizing it would be churlish not to meet this young Frenchman
who was replacing him, he hurried along the corridor in the big spoke
when he saw the ferry comin