.

Mitch Storey's bubb, lightest loaded, was jumping ahead. But you could
hear him playing _Old Man River_ on his mouth organ, inside his helmet.

The Kuzaks' bubbs, towing massive loads, were accelerating slowest, with
the ex-gridiron twins riding the rigging. But their rings would dwindle
to star specks before long, too.

The job scout's rocket, carrying Ramos and Gimp, began to flame for a
landing at Serene.

In the airtight cabin of Xavier Rodan's vehicle, Frank Nelsen and David
Lester had read and signed their contracts and had received their
copies.

Rodan didn't smile. "Now we'll go down and have a look at the place I'm
investigating," he said.

IV

Frank Nelsen's view of empire-building on the Moon was brief, all
encompassing, and far too sketchy to be very satisfying, as
Rodan--turned about in his universal-gimbaled pilot seat--spiralled his
battered rocket down backwards, with the small nuclear jets firing
forward in jerky, tooth-cracking bursts, to check speed further.

It was necessary to go around the abortive sub-planet that had always
accompanied the Earth, almost once, to reduce velocity enough for a
landing.

Thus, Nelsen glimpsed much territory--the splashed, irregular shape of
Serenitatis, the international base on the mare, the dust sea of the
same name; the radiating threads of trails and embryo highways, the
ever-widening separation of isolated domes and scattered human diggings
and workings faintly scratched in the lunar crust, as, at a still great
height, Frank's gaze swept outward from the greatest center of human
endeavor on the Moon.

It was much the same around Tycho Station, except that this base was
smaller, and was built in a great, white-rayed crater, whose walls were
pierced by tunnels for exit and entry.

The Tovie camp, glimpsed later, and only at the distant horizon, seemed
not very different from the others, except for the misleading patterns
of camouflage. That the Tovies should have an exclusive center of their
own was not even legal, according to U.N. agreements. But facts were
facts, and what did anyone do about them?

Frank was not very concerned with such issues just then, for there was
an impression that was overpowering: The slightness of the intrusion of
his kind on a two thousand-something miles-in-diameter globe of
incredible desert, overlapping ring-walls, craters centered in radiating
streaks of white ash, mountain ranges that sank gradually into