oculars. He touched Fran on the shoulder and offered them. Fran
stared up at him with dazed eyes, not really attending to Soames at all.
He looked back at the moon.

He focussed the binoculars. They were excellent glasses. The
ring-mountains at the edge of sunshine on the moon were very, very
distinct. He could see those tiny speckles of light on the dark side of
the terminator which were mountain-tops rising out of darkness into the
sunshine. There was Aristarchus and Copernicus and Tycho. There were the
vast, featureless "mares,"--those plains of once-liquid lava which had
welled out when monstrous missiles the size of counties buried
themselves deep in the moon's substance. The moon could be seen as
battered; shattered, devastated; destroyed.

Soames touched Fran's shoulder again and showed him how one looked
through the binoculars. Fran's hand shook as he took them. He put them
to his eyes.

Zani put her hands over her eyes with a little cry. It was as if she
tried to shut out the sight that Fran saw. Mal began to cry quietly. Hod
made little gasping noises.

Fran lowered the binoculars. He looked at Soames with a terrible hatred
in his eyes.

Soames went back to Gail, leaving the binoculars with the children. He
found himself sweating.

"When," asked Soames harshly, "were the mountains on the moon made? It's
an interesting question. I just got an answer. They were made when there
were three-toed horses and many ganoid fishes on the earth."

* * * * *

"The children knew the moon when it--wasn't the way it is now," he said
with some difficulty. "You know what that is! Ring-mountains sometimes
hundreds of miles across, splashings of stone from the impact of
asteroids and moonlets and islands of rock and metal falling from the
sky. The mares are where the moon's crust was punctured and lava poured
out. The streaks are where up-flung stuff was thrown hundreds of miles!

"It was a guess," said Soames. "But it's not a guess any longer. There
was a Fifth Planet, and it either exploded or was blown to bits, heaven
knows how! But the moon was bombarded by the wreckage, and so was Earth!
Mountain-ranges fell from the sky right here on this world, too. There
was destruction on Earth to match that on the moon. Perhaps here and
there some place remained undestroyed, an acre here, perhaps a square
mile a thousand miles away. Some life survived, and now it's all
forgotten. There are rains