* * * * *
Sixty-six hours to the moon. That's what it takes with marginal escape
velocity and free-fall conditions. But it was really five hundred
thousand years and sixty-six hours, Jim thought. Surely there hadn't
been a single hour in all that time when someone, somewhere on earth
had not felt the longing to solve the secret mystery of the moon.
Now they were about to find the answer. But what would they have
when they found it? They would know that the surface dust of the moon
consisted of certain percentages of silicates and oxides. They would
know that the under layers were composed of rocks, maybe of granite or
limestone or basalt. They would determine how much of each.
And then it would be over. The quest of the ages would be answered
with a few simple statements that could be obtained in any high-school
chemistry lab--if the lab were on the moon.
Jim Cochran felt there _had_ to be more to it than that.
Why do dogs howl at the moon on winter nights?
Why do men say that madness of the mind is lunacy?
Why must planting be done in the right phase of the moon?
Little sleep was had by any of the crew during the next two nights,
even though the instrument stage of the ship was now completely inert
except for occasional telemetry signals that were fed to the computers
for course checking and correction. The ship was simply falling on its
own momentum.
Six hours before moonfall, activities in the tracking center
accelerated and the tension increased. There was no question of hitting
the moon; the landing had to be made safe for the cargo of instruments.
Jim Cochran watched the operators during this period. He told himself
he didn't understand it, but he had actually learned a great deal of
electronics during the past two years. He had had to in order to design
and operate a chemical laboratory 240,000 miles away.
The television screens came on, showing the pock-marked surface of the
moon as the ship orbited. The thrill and the fear of the great unknown
began to rise in Jim's throat. By the silence in the room, he was sure
the others sensed it, too.
Abruptly, the braking command was given and the ship began to fall
out of orbit towards the planned landing in the Sea of Rains. On the
screens, the images swelled as the ship plummeted faster. In one corner
could be seen the spring-loaded extension legs, like those of some
great spider. It seemed impossible that these could cushion the violent
shock of landing.
The sudden surge of a retro rocket and the blast of moondust blinded
the television eye, but there was a sense of crazy, rocking, rolling
motion. Then the eye went dead.
Jim almost cried out. The ship couldn't have crashed.
* * * * *
An operator quickly switched controls and the screens came alive again.
He turned a dial slowly. The camera eye moved. It swept the craggy
horizon and the nearby floor of the Sea of Rains. Others had seen this
before, but it was the first time for Jim. He found himself pushing
forward, drinking in the sight eagerly.
"The moon--the moon--" he said softly to himself. But the others heard
it and they understood.
Signals were sent across space to collapse the landing legs and unfold
the sides of the instrument cone like the leaves of a flower. The
Prospector lay exposed to the environment for which it was built.
Slowly, in response to other signals, the worm-screw drives, which had
been retracted against the body of the vehicle, turned through an arc
and lowered to the surface. Locked in position, the drive screws began
turning slowly. The vehicle moved off the now-useless landing support
and became an entity of its own.
The ungainly arms of the solar cells automatically oriented toward
the sun; the antennas pointed toward earth. The scanning cameras in
the turret of the Prospector took control of the video circuits and
the turret slowly turned as the vehicle moved across the face of the
moon. The landing support remained behind and slowly dwindled like some
useless wreckage.
There was sudden pandemonium in the tracking center control room. The
operators laid down their headsets and began pounding each other on
the back, while ear-splitting Indian yells filled the air. Jim and Sam
found themselves beating each other on the arms and yelling senselessly.
"We made it!" Sam cried. "We made it! We got your little old laboratory
up there for you!"
* * * * *
There were hours of testing and calibration yet to be done before
the Prospector could be used for its primary mission. Hundreds of
electronic circuits had to be checked to see that they survived the
takeoff and landing without becoming distorted or inoperative.
Jim went home for the rest of the night. When he returned the next
morning Sam reported that all circuits were go, and the Prospector was
his.
He had operated the laboratory in the Prospector many times, either
on a mock-up or from this control panel while the Prospector was in
the hangar. But he couldn't keep the faint tremor from his hand as he
reached for the first control that would manipulate the machine on the
moon.
The drill had been extended to operating position, but the head had not
yet been energized. Jim touched it to the fine dust of the floor of
the Sea of Rains. The drill went quickly to a depth of eighteen inches
in the dust before it struck something firmer.
"That kills the theory about eighty feet of that stuff, anyway," said
Sam as he read the instruments.
Jim was not interested in depth at this time. He fed some of the
surface material into the laboratory and set the controls to run the
preprogrammed analysis. They waited minutes; then the analysis began to
appear in cryptic symbols on a paper tape.
Jim glanced at it and frowned.
"What's the matter? Isn't it working right?" Sam asked anxiously.
Jim hesitated. "It indicates the presence of several silicates, some
carbonates, and a high percentage of oxides. These are mostly of
sodium, calcium, and iron, as you might expect. But there's something
wrong with your calibration. The atomic and molecular characteristics
aren't coming through right."
"The boys ran checks on the standard samples aboard the Prospector
last night," said Sam. "The results tallied exactly. I'll show you the
tapes."
* * * * *
Jim waited, puzzled, while Sam brought up the check tapes. When he saw
them, he shook his head. "There's a standard calcium carbonate sample
carried aboard the Prospector. Here's a calcium carbonate picked off
the surface. You can see the difference yourself. The nominal analysis
is the same, but the atomic weights and the energy levels are just
slightly different. That doesn't make sense unless your circuits are
out of calibration."
"Let's run another standard sample," said Sam.
Within a few minutes the calibration check had been repeated. Jim held
up the tape. Sam peered over his shoulder. "Just like the first one,"
said Sam. "Nothing's wrong with the circuits. Maybe you've got some new
stuff there, that's never been identified before."
"That's hardly possible," said Jim. "There aren't any new elements
in the places where sodium and calcium and silica are supposed to
be. Yet, I don't understand how this can be. If the atomic weights
are different, and the energy levels are different, they have to be
different elements. It doesn't make sense."
"Well, why don't we push on," said Sam, "that is, if you've completed
the surface sampling in this spot. Some samples at lower depths may
give other indications."
Jim agreed. He drove the drill deeper into the face of the moon.
At ten-foot intervals he removed samples and ran them through the
analyzer. The results were the same down to the hundred-foot level.
All results showed common chemical elements with slightly variant
atomic characteristics.
Which made them _different_ chemical elements!
After six hours, Jim stood up from the console and shook his head
wearily. "It's no good, Sam. There's something wrong that I can't put
my finger on. If it isn't in the circuits, I don't know where it is.
But these readings just aren't right. There's no use going deeper until
we find out where the error is."
Sam's face was somber. "There just isn't any error. There can't be.
Unless it was made by whoever put the moon together--"
"Please make a complete check of every analyzer and telemetry circuit
tonight, and we'll try again tomorrow. I want to think about this."
* * * * *
He thought about it, and he dreamed about it. And along about three
o'clock in the morning he sat bolt upright in bed and stared at the dim
moonlight on the opposite wall of the bedroom.
It wasn't possible, he told himself audibly. It just wasn't possible!
Mary stirred and leaned on one elbow beside him. "What's the matter.
Are you having nightmares?"
"Yeah--yeah, I guess I am. I'll be back in a minute, honey." He got up
and padded to the door. "I've got to make a phone call."
"At this time of night?"
But Jim was gone. He turned on the hall light and dialed Sam's number.
After a long time Sam answered sleepily.
"Wake up!" said Jim. "I've just figured it out!"
"Who the devil--? Oh, it's you, Jim. Figured out what? Do you know what
time it is."
"Do you know the results of your calibration re-check?"
"How would I know that? I've got the night crew on it, but I didn't ask
them to report to me in the middle of the night. Go back to bed, and
let's talk about it in the morning."
"They're not going to find anything wrong, Sam."
"I could have told you that."
"But the elements of the moon are different--and there's only one
explanation."
"What?"
"Think about it a minute, Sam. We take a spectrograph of the sun, and
we find the same elements that are here on earth. We turn it on Alpha
Centauri and find the same thing. We turn it to the farthest stars we
can find that give enough light to record by. Always the same. Calcium
is calcium, whether it's on the earth or on a star a half billion light
years away."
"So?" Sam's voice was tired, and he sounded as if he was listening only
because Jim was too good a friend to tell to go to hell for calling in
the middle of the night.
"So? So what?" Sam repeated.
"So we go to the moon," said Jim, "and all of a sudden calcium isn't
calcium, and the sodium on the moon isn't the same as the sodium on
earth and on the sun and on Alpha Centauri and the stars a half billion
light years away. Don't you see what that means!"
"No, I guess not," said Sam dully. "Maybe in the morning--"
"It means the moon just doesn't _belong_, Sam! It means the moon is
completely foreign to anything in the Solar System, in the whole
galaxy--in any galaxy we have been able to analyze. It means the moon
has come from somewhere else, from a region of space where atoms and
electrons are not even the same as atoms and electrons here. It must be
a somewhere that's so far away it's beyond the edge of space as we know
it!"
"I'll get dressed and come over," said Sam.
* * * * *
Mary made chocolate and toast, and they sat around the kitchen table
thinking and talking of the awesome implications of Jim's theory.
"If what you say is true," said Sam, "it might be that the slightest
contact with any substance of the moon would be sheer poison to a human
being. A returning vessel could never be permitted to enter the earth's
atmosphere, and decontamination would become one of the major branches
of science."
"That's entirely possible. It would complicate enormously the problems
of establishing a moon-base. A speck of moondust inside the base might
be as lethal as an unshielded reactor."
Mary was looking out the kitchen window toward the thin crescent of
moon that was setting over the city. She thought of Allan, who would
soon be voyaging to that alien world. "It's like a trap up there in the
sky. We should never have tried to reach it."
"No--it's not like that at all," said Jim vigorously. "We'll solve
whatever problems we find there. But think of it! We don't have to
build a ship capable of crossing billions of light years of space to
see what's out there. Something from out there has come to us and
parked right in our own front yard. We have a thousand times more
reason to go now!"
Sam toyed with his toast and dunked it in the chocolate. "I think you
ought to keep it quiet--until we really _know_, don't you."
"Why? I'll run some more tests, sure. I'll plug every loophole there
can possibly be. But unless I find something new I'm going to announce
it. Why shouldn't I?"
"I don't think Hennesey will like it, for one thing. Too sensational.
Even when we actually land there and confirm your analyses by
on-the-spot checks--it's still only a theory that the moon doesn't
belong to this galaxy. You'll never be able to prove that."
"What we've found already is proof enough!"
"Not for Hennesey. He'll ask to see the shipping manifest by which the
moon was transferred here. You know Hennesey."
"Sure, I know Hennesey," said Jim bitterly. "And he doesn't count.
Not in something like this. This is big, and important, and I'm going
to announce it. I want the credit for discovering it. It'll be called
Cochran's Theory, and some University will offer me at least an
honorary Ph.D. Is that bad?"
Sam shook his head. "Of course it's not bad. But I wonder what the
public reaction will be like, and how about Congress--especially if
this business about possible poisoning from moondust turns out to be
correct? There might be a lot of pressure to cut funds and maybe cancel
the whole moon project."
"If moondust is lethal, there's no better time to be warned against it
than right now!"
* * * * *
He spent the following week, eighteen hours a day, at the chemical
analysis panel in the tracking station. As long as the moon was above
the horizon, day or night, he kept experiments going--checking,
re-checking, calibrating, searching for loopholes.
There were no loopholes. There was no malfunction of equipment. The
atoms of the moon's elements were not the same as those of the rest of
the galaxy.
When Allan next came to visit on leave from his own station, Jim told
him what had been found. Allan's face paled a little as he listened in
awe to the story. He stood up and paced across the room as Jim finished.
"I always knew there would be something--something extra in this," he
said. "You look up at night and you know the moon can't be just another
piece of earth. Now--you've found out what it is!
"How far could it have come? How old can it be? Imagine stepping out
onto a world so old, from so far away!"
"You haven't heard it all," said Mary tensely.
"There's more?"
"They think perhaps the slightest touch of moon substance may be
lethal."
"We don't know," said Jim hastily. "It's a thought that Sam advanced.
But I think it's quite possible. We won't know until we can run animal
tests. But special precautions will have to be taken to decontaminate
the Apollo after you re-enter with your space-suits."
"This will mean engineering changes. Are they under way?"
"I haven't announced my theory yet. But the necessary changes to
provide for decontamination will have to be made."
"I wanted this as much as you," said Mary. "But now it's gone all
wrong. We should have gone on dreaming about the moon and let it be a
dream that never came true. I'm afraid of it now. No man should set
foot on something so alien and so different."
Allan put an arm around her shoulders and shook her gently. "Sis! What
kind of talk is that? You're talking to the guy who's going to be the
first one to put his foot on the moon."
* * * * *
From the mountain of data accumulated in his experiments, Jim wrote his
paper. Hennesey could control the publication of any material based on
space experiments to the extent that they affected national security.
But even he could not find a means to extend a security blanket to
cover a theory of extra-galactic origin of the moon.
He raged at Jim, however. "You'll make a laughing stock of us in every
scientific center of the world! You can't publish a ridiculous thing
like this!"
"No one will laugh if he reads the data I've got to present," said Jim.
"Every member of our staff who knows the subject has verified that the
data are correct. The conclusion is inescapable."
"I can't forbid publication, Cochran," said Hennesey, "but I think it
is very unwise for you to go ahead. Very unwise."
"I'll take that risk," said Jim.
He sent the paper to the Journal of Astro-physics. At the same time he
sent an announcement to the major news services.
He had expected some sensationalism in the reporting. There was more
than he bargained for. Some of the headlines that followed were:
"Savant Says Moon is Messenger from Outer Space."
"Moon Will Poison Earth."
"Moon Trip--One Way only."
The reactions in the upper echelons of NASA were almost as bad--in
their own way. No thought had ever been given to a need for complete
decontamination of astronauts and equipment after exposure on the moon.
The requirement, if admitted, would threaten the entire program in
the minds of some of the engineers. Others admitted it was tough, but
thought they could solve it in an extra year or so. Rumblings were
heard echoing down from Congressional halls. Why hadn't the stupid
scientists known in the beginning that this was necessary? Always
bungling things--
In the end, it was Alan himself who came up with a proposal that kept
the project from bogging down and still provided some measure of
protection against the possible menace. He suggested a plastic outer
suit to be fitted over the space-suit and discarded as the astronaut
re-entered the space vehicle. With care, such a procedure could prevent
direct contact with moondust. In the meantime, it was hoped that robot
vehicles could bring back moon samples before the Apollo was sent out.
This rather mild proposal did much to calm the furor in NASA and
contractor engineering circles and soon the press had abandoned it
for other, more sensational stories. But Hennesey and a number of
other officials didn't forget. Some of them believed Jim Cochran was a
charlatan at worse and an incompetent at best. They considered he had
degraded American science with his fantastic theory.
Scientific judgement was being held in abeyance until actual moon
samples were available on earth. For the present, at least one of
Jim's predictions had come true. The hypothesis was becoming known as
Cochran's Theory. That it was also called Cochran's Idiocy by a few
didn't matter.
Jim continued his own sixteen-hour stints at the analyzer controls,
probing in a wide pattern over the floor of the Sea of Rains, and
striking deeper toward the heart of the moon with each probe.
Probing to such great depths was made possible by a development that
didn't even exist when the Prospector design was begun. Then, it was
hoped that penetration to a foot and a half of the moon's surface might
be possible. Five-hundred-foot holes were only a madman's nightmare.
How could you carry such drilling equipment all the way to the moon?
Then, in the last months of Prospector design, laser devices had been
produced, capable of burning holes in a diamond. It was only a small
step, then, to the design of a drilling head which mounted a cluster of
laser beams. These would literally burn their way toward the heart of
the moon.
* * * * *
The laser drilling head was lowered on five hundred feet of minute
cable, which had tremendous tensile strength. The vaporized moon
substance boiled out of the hole and condensed above the surface,
settling as fine dust. As the hole deepened, the condensation products
coated the upper portions of the hole and the cable. To keep the hole
from thus being closed, the cable was vibrated at a frequency that
shook loose the condensing rock products, and the laser head was raised
with beams shooting upward to clear the hole.
Jim found that a very special technique was required to raise and lower
the head at the proper intervals to keep the hole clear and prevent
loss of the drilling head. A spare was carried, but he didn't want to
face the loss of even one. After three weeks, he felt confident in his
operation and began lowering the drilling head to depths of two hundred
and three hundred feet.
As he had expected, along with the lunar geologists who were
participating, the moon showed a definite pattern of stratification.
But the differences between the layers seemed slight. Chalky, calcium
compounds were abundant. Some were powdery; others were pressed into
brittle limestone formations. No really hard rocks such as granite were
encountered, however. The boundaries between layers were ill-defined.
No one knew what to make of it. The observations were interesting.
Explanations were wholly lacking.
Then, after five weeks of probing, on the edge of the four-hundred-foot
level, Jim found something new. He sought out Sam at the end of the day.
"A few years ago," he said, "scientists were startled to find chemicals
that were the product of life, inside meteors from outer space."
"I understand they've even found bacteria which they have been able to
bring to life," said Sam.
Jim nodded. "More than four hundred feet deep on the moon I've found
the same kind of chemicals--hydrocarbons that must be the product of
living cells."
"Four hundred feet deep on the moon--" said Sam musingly. "And maybe
the moon came from billions of billions of light years across space. So
wherever it came from there was something living. What is it? Traces of
bacteria, or chemical remains of plant life like our coal mines?"
Jim shook his head. "I don't know yet. I'm not sure we can find out
until we go there. But, as you say, it means the moon was once the
scene of life--wherever it came from."
"One thing I haven't understood," said Sam, "is why the moon stopped
here if it had been traveling through space for so long. Why didn't it
keep on going?"
"It was just a combination of factors," said Jim. "The moon happened
to be traveling at just the right speed. The earth was in just the
right place at the right time. As a result, the moon fell into an orbit
around the earth. Pure accident."
"A lucky accident!" said Sam.
Jim looked up at the pale moon above their heads as they walked toward
the parking lot. "I hope so," he said. "We will soon know whether it
was a lucky or an unlucky accident."
* * * * *
The moon laboratory had not been designed for extensive organic
chemical analysis. There were only a few things it could do with
organic compounds. But these were sufficient to convince Jim that the
moon had once been the scene of life.
Why so deep? he wondered. Nothing had been found in the upper levels,
unless he had missed it--he would have to check that out later.
As the drilling head moved slowly downward, the evidence of fossil
hydrocarbons increased. There seemed to be an almost geometric increase
in concentration after he passed the four-hundred-foot level. He was
certain the drill was penetrating a bed of fossil remains of some form
of life that flourished the little planet that the moon must have been
incalculable eons ago.
The more he thought about his theory, however, the more difficult
it became to explain all the factors. If the moon had actually been
a planet of some far distant system, what had torn it loose from its
parent sun and sent it careening through space? Had its sun exploded,
blasting whatever planets the system held into the depths of space?
Such an occurrence might explain the sterility of the moon's surface,
but why was the evidence of life buried so deep? Perhaps the upper
layers of the moon's surface consisted of debris blasted from the
exploding sun. Such debris would have been molten, flowing about the
moon's surface, cremating everything living. Finally, it would have
shrunk in the cold depths of space and wrinkled into the vast mountains
and cracks that laced the moon's surface.
It was one way it could have happened, but it seemed so fantastic that
Jim had difficulty in convincing himself that it was true.
He doubted the accuracy of his analyses. There were so many tenuous
links between the substance on the moon and his own senses that an
error in any one of them could destroy the accuracy of the results. But
he had no reason to doubt.
He began making calibration checks before and after every analysis. It
added scores of hours to his work. Sam sat beside him, checking and
verifying the accuracy of the telemetering circuits constantly. The
operation was as foolproof as their science could make it.
"You've got to believe what you find," said Sam. "There's no other
answer."
And then, one day, Jim found an answer that was utterly impossible to
believe. His mind balked and closed up completely at the thought.
Sam had been watching him for almost three hours, aware that something
had perturbed Jim exceedingly. Sam kept his mouth shut and leaned
quietly against the desk of his own console, keeping check on the
circuits while he watched Jim grow more and more distressed. Sam didn't
understand the processes, but he was aware that Jim had been going over
and over the same analysis for almost two hours. At last Jim's face
seemed to go utterly white, and his hands became motionless on the
console.
Sam waited a long time. Then he asked, "What is it, Jim? What's the
matter?"
Jim continued to stare at the panels of the console, then answered as
if from some far nightmare distance. "Two chemicals, Sam," he said.
"One of them a big molecule, something like hemoglobin. And neither of
them could exist as fossils. Their structure would have broken down
long ago. They could exist only in _live_ tissue!"
He continued staring. Neither of them moved. Sam felt as if he had just
heard something in a nightmare and had only to wait a minute until he
woke up. Then it would be gone.
Jim turned his head at last and faced Sam. He gave a short, harsh bark
of a laugh that sounded half-hysterical.
"We'd be off our rockers, wouldn't we Sam? Clear off our rockers to
believe there could be something alive five hundred feet inside the
moon!"
"Sure--and if it were alive, it wouldn't be sitting still while the
laser beams drilled a hole into it. Besides, we just couldn't be lucky
enough to lower the drill right smack into some cave where a moon bear
was hibernating. All the circuits must have busted down at the same
time. We'll fix it tomorrow. Let's get the girls and have a night on
the town."
* * * * *
It was a very unsuccessful night on the town. Jim and Mary, and Sam and
his wife went to a show and a nightclub.
"You're moving like a zombie. What's the matter?" said Mary as she and
Jim danced together.
"Feel like a zombie. Why don't we give it up and go home? I want to
get down to the lab by five in the morning."
"That's the trouble. You've done nothing but live in the lab since the
Prospector landed. So we're not going home. Sam and Alice are having
a good time. You dance with Alice next, and make her think you're
enjoying it!"
So Jim didn't go to bed at all, but he _was_ at the lab by five in the
morning. The night crew were still at work. He had steered them away
from the analyses he was doing so they were unaware of the shattering
results he had found.
He took over the controls, and resumed work alone.
There was no doubt about it. If any of the methods they were using were
accurate, then he had discovered almost indisputable proof that some
living tissue existed five hundred feet below the surface of the moon.
Since the laser drilling head sealed the walls of the hole with a
coating of frozen lava, it was necessary to probe horizontally for
samples. Small extension drills, capable of reaching five feet on
either side of the hole, were carried in the head for this purpose.
Jim lowered the head through the last twenty feet of its drilling
limit. Every six inches he sent the horizontal probes to their limits.
The tell-tale chemicals existed at every point. He computed the volume
he had probed, and felt numb.
By the time Sam had shown up, Jim had withdrawn the probe to the
surface and was moving the Prospector slowly across the moon's surface.
Sam saw the motion on the television screen. "Where are you going? I
thought we were going to check out the hole we were in."
"It's been checked," said Jim. He hesitated. His original plan had been
to move the Prospector a distance of fifty feet and probe again to the
five-hundred-foot level. Then, decisively, he pressed the control that
kept the Prospector moving. He stopped it a hundred feet from the
previous hole and began the long, tedious job of drilling again to the
limits of the Prospector's equipment.
* * * * *
Sam spelled him off during the day. By evening, they had hit the
four-hundred-and-fifty-foot level. Jim took his first analysis in this
hole. The chemicals were there. In greater concentration than at the
same level in the previous hole.
Jim turned to Sam. "We have circuits for measuring potential
differences on the lunar landscape. Could we make a reading at the
bottom of this hole?"
Sam considered. "It'll take some doing, but I think we can manage it.
What do you expect to find from that?"
Jim didn't dare tell him what was in his mind. "I don't know," he said.
"But it might be worth trying--if there _is_ anything living down
there--"
By the following afternoon, Sam had made the necessary equipment
arrangements so that potential readings could be obtained in the mass
from which the chemical samples were being removed. The telemetered
report was connected to a recorder that plotted the variations against
a time scale.
As soon as the circuit was set up and calibrated, the recording meter
showed a response. A very slow, rhythmic pulsation showed in the inked
line on the paper.
Jim felt as if his breathing must have stopped for an infinite length
of time. "That's what I thought we'd find," he said at last.
"What?" said Sam. "I don't understand what you're talking about. What
do you think those pulsations mean?"
"Did you ever hear of an electroencephalograph?" said Jim, gravely.
"Electro--Sure, brain wave recordings. Jim! You don't think these
waves--!"
In silence, the two men stared at the wavering pen and the sheet of
recording paper that slowly unrolled beneath it.
* * * * *
Dr. Thomas Banning had been a class mate of Jim Cochran when they were
both in their first couple of years of college. Banning had gone on
into medicine, specializing in brain studies, while Jim had turned to
chemistry. The two had been out of touch for several years.
Tom Banning was the first one Jim thought of, not only because of their
old friendship, but because he had read recent papers describing some
of Tom's new work on the frontier of electroencephalography. He called
first on the phone, then arranged for a personal visit. Sam went with
him. They had closed down all Prospector work while they were to be
away.
* * * * *
Tom met them and was introduced to Sam as he ushered them into his own
modest laboratory. "This isn't the plush sort of surroundings you've
become used to," he said as he showed them around. "The Government
isn't spending billions these days trying to find out how the human
mind works."
Jim could well understand Tom's bitterness. Doing research on the
frontiers of the mind, he was forced to spend his own money for much of
his laboratory equipment.
"I can sympathize, but that's about all," said Jim. "I just work here
myself."
"Tell me about your problem. On the phone, that sounded interesting
enough to make a man's day brighter. You said something about an
unknown life form with electrical pulses that might be related to brain
waves?"