Holroyd watched in horror, unable to tear his eyes from the screen.

At first glance, the tiny figure struggling in the center of the screen might have been a fly caught upon some reddish-white, glowing, slightly flickering surface. Then the camera zoomed in and the figure resolved into a man, squirming desperately on the frictionless, bowl-shaped surface of the force screen that suspended him above the hellfire of the magma.

The image of Martinson expanded still more, and at the same time he looked up at the camera suspended above him, so that his face suddenly filled the screen. His eyes were wide, bulging, his face glistened with sweat. His lips moved, but whether with curses or pleas or recantations, Holroyd could not tell.

Alone in his small apartment, Holroyd said aloud, "For God's sake, get it over with!"

Martinson stopped moving, surrendering at last, and the camera drew back again to savor the image of the condemned man lying still in the very center of the force screen, its lowest point, his eyes closed, his shoulders heaving as he wept in despair. Only then did the executioner act.

A second force screen came into existence above the weeping man. It was invisible, ultimately transparent, but its presence was obvious from its effect. It was lowered until, as Holroyd and all his fellow Americans watched, Martinson was forced flat on his stomach, spread eagled, squeezed between the two screens. He stayed that way for only a moment, too tightly held to move with weeping, perhaps too tightly held to breathe.

With the upper screen now strong enough to hold the magma by itself, the executioner cut the flow of energy to the lower screen, and it vanished. Liberated by that tiny amount, the magma blossomed upward until it hit the upper force screen.

That small motion of the magma was invisible on the television screen. All Holroyd could see was how his cousin shriveled in an instant, vaporized, was gone. The picture of the now empty, glowing magma surface persisted for a few seconds, the calm sun at the heart of the world, and then the television screen went blank.

To Holroyd's astonishment, Cathy was at work the next day. White-faced and thin-lipped, she sat at her console next to his, making fine adjustments, recording changes in heat flow, saying nothing. After more than an hour of this tense silence, Andrew could bear it no more. Eyes still on his console, he said softly, "Cathy, I'm sorry."

"Killer!"

Holroyd looked at her in shock. Tears were rolling down her cheeks, and yet her tightly clenched jaw did not betray even a quiver. She looked at him at last. "You murdered him, not the government!"

"No," he gasped, shaking his head, "no, I just--"

But she was gone, running down the long, stone corridor.

He waited almost another hour, hoping she'd return, and then reluctantly he called in an Operator Missing alarm. The consoles must always be manned. He feared he might have endangered his own freedom by waiting so long to report Cathy's absence. Fear for himself warred with fear that by reporting her absence from her console he had condemned her.

Three days after her disappearance, as he was eating his supper and idly watching the evening newscast, Andrew was surprised into full attention when Cathy's face appeared suddenly on the screen. He recognized the shot. It had been cropped from a picture of the three of them taken during an outing in California a couple of years earlier, before Cathy and Henry had decided to get married. Andrew shook his head as if to clear it of the memory and tried to force his attention to the rich baritone of the newscaster.

"According to the announcement from the Acting Secretary of Security, Cathy Martinson, the widow of the traitor Henry Martinson, whose execution was broadcast earlier this week, was seen prying the cover off an old ventilation duct in Chicago. The police warrant who saw her tried to stop her, but she eluded him and escaped into the duct. A note was later found at her quarters stating that she intended to carry out the plot for which her husband was executed. She is of course presumed dead."

Both of them dead! It seemed impossible. They had been a major part of Holroyd's life ever since their childhood together, a part of his world, a constant part of the background. Now suddenly, violently, both had been snatched away.

The image of Henry's execution returned with frightful clarity, as it was to do again and again during the coming years. Another image came to him suddenly, this one purely imaginary--Cathy lying on the surface, on the frozen ground, her body permeated with ice, dead beneath the silent layers of snow. Pretty Cathy. Eternally unchanging Cathy.

It was the very next morning that Andrew Holroyd's patriotism rceived its reward.The red light on the corner of his con blinked at him, signifying a message from his supervisor. When he acknowledged, Clayton's voice boomed out, causing operators' heads to turn throughout the cavern. "Holroyd! Good work on that traitor last week. I've just got the papers confirming your promotion. W01, Holroyd, and there'll be more to come, you can bet. You're Warrant class, now, boy. Congratulations!" The red light winked off.

"But that wasn't what I wanted at all," Andrew whispered. "I was just trying to save him." But the thought intruded unpreventably that now, at last, he would be able to move from his cramped apartment, that he could afford and would be allowed something better.

"Well, what did they have to say?"

Horwith snorted. "They told me there's a team of experts on the way from Mendeleev to have a look. We're to cooperate fully."

"So much for letting us handle it ourselves."

"Yeah. We're not real scientists. We don't count." Honesty forced him to add grudgingly, "Of course, Battani is at Mendeleev, and he's part of the team that's coming here. I suppose he knows a lot more about this junk than we do." The long white arm of his surface suit gestured clumsily toward the stacks of electronic gear before which he and Glen Alenian were seated. He let his arm drift down again in the gentle gravity. It bounced slightly, slowly, off the side of the boulder he was leaning against.

Beneath their feet was the barren, beautiful surface of the moon. The helter-skelter piles of equipment--some of it in smooth metal casings, some exposed like jury-rigged laboratory equipment, and all bound together by a bewildering rat's nest of wiring--was exposed to the vacuum. Its only protection came from the huge boulders which sheltered it on three sides, forming a cul-de-sac, and the flimsy metal roof fastened to the tops of the boulders. Sunlight was thus kept off the equipment, and it was adequately protected from meteorites, but since it required a very hard vacuum to operate, the enclosure was not sealed and pressurized. Horwith, used as he was to working in uncomfortable surroundings, nonetheless hated the necessity of spending all of his shift in his bulky, awkward, cramped surface suit.

Alenian said soothingly, "It's probably a good idea, then. Battani more or less invented T-band, didn't he?"

"Discovered." Horwith made the correction automatically. "Oh, I guess I don't mind too much. It gets boring sitting out here with nothing to do but monitor the equipment. The company'll be welcome. But they'd better not get any ideas about moving the stuff over to Mendeleev and using their own people to run it."

Alenian laughed at the idea. "NASA would fight that tooth and nail."

"Also," Horwith added thoughtfully, "we could make the argument that we don't know how well it would operate that close to the big antennas at Mendeleev. We really don't know enough yet about how prone T-band is to interference." He pushed himself away from the boulder. "They should be here any minute. I'll go look for them."

He slid the dark, highly reflective sunscreen down over his visor and stepped from the shelter into the brilliant sunlight. He stood still and scanned the sky, but all he could see was the usual wild blaze of stars, unblinking and many colored. If anything was moving among them, it was invisible to him. Presumably, the vehicle bringing the team of experts from Mendeleev would be flying low, in which case it would slip over the horizon only minutes before arriving.

Nearby stood the rover that had brought him and Alenian here from a nearby base at the beginning of their shift. Behind him was the sun, small and blindingly white, impossible to look at even through his sunscreen. It was low now, near the uneven horizon, casting his shadow long before him over the rolling, dipping, rising surface. Even further behind him, he knew, but beyond the horizon, was the lovely blue-white ball of Earth.

Horwith had been here for months on this tour of duty. It would be Paradise to get back to a place with an atmosphere, a place where he could go outside a building without first squeezing into a man-sized spaceship with arms and legs. He hated the moon.

The Mendeleev surface shuttle appeared suddenly over the lunar horizon, unsettling Horwith even though he had been expecting it to come into view in just that way. It arrowed toward him, no more than twenty meters above the surface, slowing as it passed over the rover.

The shuttle was a long, slender vehicle that flew with its long axis parallel to the ground. Small rocket nozzles were spaced evenly along the bottom, and small, round windows lined the side facing Horwith. He felt a surge of jealousy and resentment. Budget-conscious NASA restricted its personnel to the rovers, wire-frame vehicles descended with little change from the lunar rovers originally built for the Apollo missions of forty years earlier. The rovers were cramped and uncomfortable, notoriously short on springs or shock absorbers. If driven too fast, they showered their occupants with lunar dust. They were powered by banks of batteries that had to be regularly recharged from sunlight and which seemed to require such recharging at least twice as frequently as the manual claimed they did. Worse, the batteries often chose to die at exactly those times when their crews would be faced with long and exhausting walks back to base.

The Mendeleev shuttle stopped some distance away from Horwith. It hovered, sank toward the ground, then hovered again about three meters above it. Horwith could feel the vibration through his boots. A cloud of dust arose, completely obscuring the vehicle. Then the vibration coming to him through the ground stopped, and almost immediately the dust fell back down. In an instant, all was clear again. The shuttle rested upon four metal legs, one at each corner, each bent outward in the middle, so that it looked like a giant insect, some creature of the vacuum that had landed temporarily upon the moon for its own obscure purposes.

Beneath the shuttle, a cage appeared, descending slowly toward the surface. As the elevator reached the bottom and stopped, the four surface-suited figures in it shuffled about uncertainly and unhappily and at last plucked up their courage enough to leave it. They struggled across the surface toward the waiting figure of Horwith, who felt flushed with superiority at their clumsiness.

He knew the type. They might spend years working on the moon and yet never go outside a building, out to the true surface, except in an emergency. They might never put on a surface suit, spending their time in office buildings that, except for the gravity, might as well be on Earth. They might as well be on Earth, he thought scornfully, forgetting the hatred for the moon and the longing to be home on Earth that he had been dwelling on only minutes before.

Horwith tongued his suit radio on and uttered the appropriate greetings, then led the four newcomers back to the shelter where Alenian still sat monitoring the behavior of the T-band receiver.

The four from Mendeleev took over the pile of equipment immediately. They asked the two NASA men a few questions, but with so much open skepticism that Horwith could hardly prevent himself from asking them why they'd bothered to come here from Mendeleev, if they doubted the existence of the signal he and his partner had picked up. He and Alenian stood back and watched in silence with the injured pride of the professional whose competence has been questioned.

Watching the four of them more closely, Horwith realized that only three of them were really dealing with the equipment. While his three companions examined the T-band receiver, their hands working with surgeon's skill even though encumbered by the gloves of their surface suits, virtually taking the equipment apart and putting it back together again without even disturbing its operation, making measurements with devices Horwith didn't even recognize, the fourth man ignored the equipment itself but pored with total absorption over the records of the signal.

There was much for him to look at. Even though the signal had only been coming in for about two hours now, there was a substantial pile of hardcopy output. When the signal first caught Horwith and Alenian's attention, they had examined it in various ways, including audio and graphic representations, before making a report. Neither had been anxious to overreact to what might be a peculiarity of the electronics rather than a genuine incoming T-band signal. If it were real, it might be a discovery of immense importance. If it were merely an artifact of their experimental equipment, they could ruin their careers by sounding the alarm prematurely. So they had taken their time, and now Battani--Horwith guessed that the fourth man was he, even though none of them had deigned to introduce himself--had the records of their preliminary investigation to look over.

The suited figure put down the papers at last and straightened up. He stood still as though lost in thought. After a few minutes, he walked over to the three men who were still examining the receiver and talked with them for a while. Horwith tongued his suit radio through the standard channels, trying to pick up their conversation, but all he could find was a meaningless gabble on one of the channels. Mendeleev had apparently added encoding/decoding equipment to its suits.

The fourth man left the group and came up to Horwith and Alenian. Still tuned to the same channel, Horwith now had no trouble understanding him. He had apparently turned off his encoder in order to speak to the canaille.

"You are Mr. Horwith and Mr. Alenian? Good day, gentlemen. My name is Battani."

Horwith tapped Alenian three times on the shoulder, quickly and lightly, to indicate the proper channel in case he hadn't already found it by himself. "I'm Horwith." He raised a hand to show it was he who had spoken.

Alenian mumbled something vague in greeting to their visitor, and Horwith could hear the suppressed laughter in Alenian's voice.

They all had their sunscreens up, of course, and in the low-power electric light under the canopy, Horwith could easily see through Battani's faceplate, so he understood why Alenian was amused.

Mendeleev bought its surface suits from NASA and was therefore stuck with two standard sizes, one designed for the average five-foot-ten-inch man, and the other for the average five-foot-five-inch woman. Battani must have been scarcely over five feet in height, and his eyes barely cleared the bottom of the faceplate. His was probably one of the suits designed for female surface workers, with minor modifications to the internal plumbing done by Mendeleev technicians. Perhaps they had also added height inside the boots for Battani's convenience, but if so, it had not been enough to really help. Not that they could have done much for him without making the suit impossible to use. Wearing the suit and working inside it must be an endless misery for him, Horwith realized.

Horwith felt a rush of sympathy for the man. He was six and a half feet tall himself and extremely thin, and it was something like torture to squeeze himself into his suit before his shift--and almost worse torture to unfold himself from within it when his shift was over. A custom-made suit was supposedly on its way from Earth, but he'd been hearing that for months, and he suspected that his tour on the moon would be up well before it arrived. Men like him and Battani--too many sigmas away from mu--could expect no sympathy from Alenian, who was blessed with precisely average height and weight.

"Doctor Battani," Horwith started to say.

Battani interrupted. "Please. Call me Al."

"Okay. Al, then. Have you come to any conclusions about our signal?"

Battani laughed. "Obviously you think it's real. You should have called it 'the anomaly,' in the approved manner. However, I think you're right. I think it's a real signal and not just an electronic quirk."

"You think?" from Alenian. "Hell, I thought you were the guy who was supposed to know everything about T-band. Don't you know whether or not it's a signal?"

Battani sighed. "I've run into this misconception before, Mr. Alenian. I'm an astrophysicist. I know virtually nothing about electronics. T-band was an accidental byproduct of something else, my work on a theoretical problem. The problem is still unsolved, by the way. But this," he pointed at the receiver, "this electronic realization of the theory--no, I don't understand it at all. However, those men do, and they seem to think the equipment is working just as it should. What you've picked up must be a real signal, coming from outside your receiver. I've been looking at the excellent preparatory investigation you two performed, and it's clear there is a significant pattern."

Alenian burst out, "A message, you mean! My God, it's a message from somewhere!"

"No, no, that's not what I said."

But the other two men weren't listening.

"A message," Horwith whispered. "Christ, I wish we had a transmitter working already! We've got to respond somehow."

"You're being too hasty," Battani insisted. "I'd like to explain what I mean, but I'm sure you're impatient for us to get out of your hair, and I simply can't spend much longer in this space suit."

"Surface suit," Alenian said.

Ignoring his partner, Horwith answered Battani's objections. "It's true we're supposed to do quite a few more hours of testing, but I think this takes precedence. Anyway, I was ordered to give you full cooperation, and if you think that includes giving us a lecture on T-band, how can NASA object?"

Battani laughed. "Jesuitical sophistry! I do have to get back, but you're welcome to come back to Mendeleev with us. We always have room for visitors there."

"Hey, wait a minute," Alenian said, his voice angry. "We can't just leave this equipment alone."

"I can order a couple of my men to stay behind and guard it," Battani said quickly.

"No, I don't think so." Alenian's voice was cold. "I'm sure NASA wouldn't approve of that at all."

"Then you stay here with it," Horwith snapped at him. "I'll go to Mendeleev. Gladly."

As he was gliding toward the Mendeleev shuttle with Battani and the three others a few minutes later, Horwith radioed, "So long, Glen. I'll be back at base before our next shift."

Alenian still sounded hostile. "See you later, Pole."

Horwith checked his stride for the barest instant and then walked steadily toward the shuttle. Battani had caught his reaction, however. Once the elevator had carried them up into the body of the shuttle and the locks had been sealed, so that they could take off their helmets and talk directly rather than over radio, Battani said mildly, "Your friend called you 'Pole.' I was told your first name is Clemmons."

"It is, but 'Pole' is what most people here call me."

"Because they think your surname is Polish?"

"Partly." He longed to drop the subject.

Battani looked up at the remarkably tall, thin engineer. "I see. If you don't mind, I'd rather call you 'Clemmons.'"

Horwith smiled down at him. "Great!"

The approach to the Mendeleev observatory was anticlimactic. Horwith had been fascinated by the great multinational observatory from the moment its construction was first seriously suggested, almost ten years earlier. The Eye at the Back of the Moon, the press had dubbed it. He had followed the press reports of its construction within the great farside crater with intense interest, hoping that some day he would be able to get one of the rare and coveted non-scientific jobs there. To an extent, that hope had led to his going to work for NASA--only to discover that no NASA personnel were stationed at Mendeleev, that in fact there was a growing animosity between the aging space agency management and the new and international upper echelon of the United Nations-sponsored organization formed solely to run the new observatory.

And he had discovered that he hated life on the moon.

Still, the old dream had never quite died. At the very least, Horwith hoped that he would now get a chance to see the ring of mighty radio and optical telescopes sited along Mendeleev's rim, that the shuttle would pass close to at least one of them on its way in toward the administrative and residential buildings clustered together at the crater's center. That hope, too, was destined to be dashed.

They approached the crater rim flying only meters above the lunar surface, and they grounded between two other shuttles on the outside surface of the crater wall, on a ledge, a terrace, cut into the wall. At the last moment, just before landing, Horwith looked up and caught a glimpse, far above on the very rim of the crater, of a spider web gleaming in the sunlight, a spider web on a vast scale. Then even that was hidden by the dirt and rock of the wall of Mendeleev.

The party left the shuttle through a flexible tube that had attached itself to the shuttle hatch. It was provided with Earth-normal air pressure, so that they were able to leave their helmets off, which Horwith considered a blessing. The tube led them to a small building, the terminus of an elevator, which in turn took them down some distance into an underground tunnel. Here a railroad track stretched off into the well lit distance. A small subway car, with room for no more than ten people, waited for them. They climbed aboard and were taken the rest of the way to the headquarters of the observatory.

"Anticlimactic, I know," Battani apologized. "A walk across the crater to the center is much more impressive. But this is much quicker, and for me it's a lot more comfortable."

"And for me," Horwith told him. "Sometimes I really hate the moon. Walking outside here isn't like walking outside on Earth. I long for a place where you can go outside without having to stuff yourself into a cramped surface suit, where you can breathe because there's something there to breath. Breezes and flowers and people."

One of the other men said, "And the girls in their summer dresses?"

Horwith grinned. "Yeah. That, too."

Another man chimed in, "And breezes to lift up the dresses."

Battani grimaced. "Some things never change," he muttered, loud enough for only Horwith to hear him.

"Some things shouldn't," Horwith told him.

This leg of the trip ended at another elevator. They rose into sunshine, muted and pleasant. As he had imagined, the buildings at Mendeleev--all connected by surface tubes and underground tunnels--were as much like Earth-surface office buildings as possible. One could spend his entire tour of duty inside them, never stepping outside. Even the rare times an astronomer had to travel in person to one of the telescopes, Horwith was to learn, he could do so by subway and elevator, ending his trip in an airtight, sealed building at the telescope's base. Only the gravity and one other thing reminded the personnel at Mendeleev that they were on the moon and not on Earth.

That other thing was the existence of windows. At the NASA Frontside base, almost everything was underground. Here at the observatory, that was also true of most of the buildings, but there were some that projected above ground, and in those buildings there were heavily tinted windows everywhere that gave a clear view of the silent, still, sterile landscape.

It was an extravagance that tortured Horwith's somewhat Puritanical soul and his NASA training. NASA's bases on the moon were uniformly buried for the sake of insulation against the fierce heat of the lunar day and the terrible cold of the lunar night. Mendeleev was so well funded that economically absurd variations in heat loss and gain were tolerated, were, in fact, not even noticed. Environment control equipment compensated. This profligacy shocked Horwith and angered him.

Mostly, though, he was angry with himself for being so fascinated with the view from the observatory's windows, a view bought by that profligacy.

Something else that fascinated Horwith was the way the other workers at Mendeleev treated Alfredo Battani.

Alenian might have laughed at the astrophysicist because of his height, but here that height seemed not to matter. Neither did Battani's accent or dark coloring. A spectrum of skin colors and accents filled Mendeleev's halls. The observatory was a citadel of the intellect. Accidents of stature counted for nothing, brilliance counted for everything, and Battani was treated with a respect verging on reverence.

The discovery pleased Horwith. He told himself, though, that his attitude was paternalistic, and that he held that attitude precisely because of Battani's shortness, as though the man's small stature somehow meant he needed to be protected. That was the sort of stereotype that Horwith had always resented when he detected it in others. It galled him to discover it in himself.

I guess I'm not a saint quite yet, he told himself. Maybe next year.

Battani's shortness had one advantage, though, and he pointed it out to Horwith himself.

After introducing Horwith to those workers who happened to be in the area when the elevator arrived, he led the way down a maze of corridors to his office. This, too, was flooded with muted sunshine. A pleasant enough effect, but the office itself was minuscule, and it was crowded, a desk and a table covered with papers taking up most of the room. "Space is still at a premium here," Battani explained. "At least, until our new building is ready, which won't be until sometime next spring. In the meantime, it's a good thing I'm not your size, or this coffin would seem even worse than it already does. Here."

He pushed some of the papers on the table aside carefully, clearing a small space for himself. He pulled himself up easily to a seat on the table and gestured to Horwith to take the swivel chair by the desk.

"Now, then, Clemmons. The guru of the mountaintop will enlighten you."