thick silence
with taped popular music, broadcast on very low power from a field set
at the diggings. But the girl voices, singing richly, only made matters
worse for Frank Nelsen. And other memories piled up on him: Jarviston,
Minnesota. Wind. Hay smell, car smell. Home... Cripes...! Damn...!

Lester's habit of muttering unintelligibly to himself was much worse,
now. Frank was expecting him to start screaming at any minute. Frank
hadn't tried to talk to him much, and Lester, more introverted than
ever, was no starter of conversations.

But now, at the sunrise--S.O.B., was it possible that they had been here
almost a month?--Frank at the diggings, indulged in some muttering,
himself.

"Are you all right, Frank?" Lester asked mildly.

"Not altogether!" Frank Nelsen snapped dryly. "How about you?"

"Oh, I believe I'm okay at last," Lester replied with startling
brightness. "I was afraid I wouldn't be. I guess I had an inferiority
complex, and there was also something to live up to. You see, my dad was
here with the original Clifford expedition. We always agreed that I
should become a space-scientist, too. Mom went along with that--until
Dad was killed, here... Well, I'm over the hump, now. You see, I'm so
interested in everything around me, that the desolation has a cushion of
romance that protects me. I don't see just the bleakness. I imagine the
Moon as it once was, with volcanoes spitting, and with thundrous sounds
in its steamy atmosphere. I see it when the Martians were here--they
surely visited Earth, too, though there all evidence weathered away. I
even see the Moon as it is, now, noticing details that are easy to
miss--the little balls of ash that got stuck together by raindrops, two
billion years ago. And the pulpy, hard-shelled plants that you can still
find, alive, if you know where to look. There are some up on the ridge,
where I often go, when offshift. Carbon dioxide and a little water vapor
must still come out of the deep crack there... Anyhow, they used to say
that a lonesome person--with perhaps a touch of schizophrenia--might do
better off the Earth than the more usual types."

Frank Nelsen was surprised as much by this open, self-analytical
explanation, and the clearing up of the family history behind him, as by
the miracle that had happened. Cripes, was it possible that, in his own
way, Lester was more rugged than anybody else of the old Bunch? Of
course even Lester was somewhat in wonder, himsel