telepathic contacts. Even when, as frequently happened, the current prophets were proved to have faked the evidence, the devotees never wavered. They needed their gods in the sky, and would not be deprived of them.
"You still haven't explained to us," Mr. Schuster was now saying, "why the saucer people should be after you. What have you done to annoy them?"
"I was getting too close to some of their secrets, so they have used this opportunity to eliminate me."
"I should have thought they could have found less elaborate ways."
"It is foolish to imagine that our limited minds can understand their mode of thinking. But this would seem like an accident; no one would suspect that it was deliberate."
"A good point. Since it makes no difference now, could you tell us what secret you were after? I'm sure we'd all like to know."
Hansteen shot a quick glance at Irving Schuster. The lawyer had struck him as a rather solemn, humorless little man; irony seemed somewhat out of character.
"I'd be glad to tell you," answered Radley. "It really starts back in nineteen fifty-three, when an American astronomer named O'Neill observed something very remarkable here on the Moon. He discovered a small bridge on the eastern border of the Mare Crisium. Other astronomers, of course, laughed at him - but less prejudiced ones confirmed the existence of the bridge. Within a few years, however, it had vanished. Obviously, our interest had alarmed the saucer people, and they had dismantled it."
That "obvious," Hansteen told himself, was a perfect example of saucerite logic - the daring non sequitur that left the normal mind helplessly floundering several jumps behind. He had never heard of O'Neill's Bridge, but there had been scores of examples of mistaken observations in the astronomical records. The Martian canals were the classic case; honest observers had reported them for years, but they simply did not exist - at least not as the fine spider web that Lowell and others had drawn. Did Radley think that someone had filled in the canals between the time of Lowell and the securing of the hrst clear photographs of Mars? He was quite capable of it, Hansteen was sure.
Presumably O'Neill's Bridge had been a trick of the lighting, or of the Moon's perpetually shifting shadows - but such a simple explanation was not, of course, good enough for kadley. And, in any event, what was the man doing here, a couple of thousand kilometers from the Mare Crisium?
Someone else had thought of that, and had put the same question. As usual, Radley had a convincing answer at the tip of his tongue.
"I'd hoped," he said, "to divert their suspicions by behaving like an ordinary tourist. Because the evidence I was looking for lay on the western hemisphere, I went east. I planned to get to the Mare Crisium by going across Farside; there were several places there that I wanted to look at, too. But they were too clever for me. I should have guessed that I'd be spotted by one of their agents - they can take human form, you know. Probably they've been following me ever since I landed on the Moon."
"I'd like to know," said Mrs. Schuster, who seemed to be taking Radley with ever-increasing seriousness, "what they're going to do to us now."
"I wish I could tell you, ma'am," answered Radley. "We know that they have eaves deep down inside the Moon, and almost certainly that's where we're being taken. As soon as they saw that the rescuers were getting close, they stepped in again. I'm afraid we're too deep for anyone to reach us now."
That's quite enough of this nonsense, said Pat to himself. We've had our comic relief, and now this madman is starting to depress people. But how can we shut him up?
Insanity was rare on the Moon, as in all frontier societies. Pat did not know how to deal with it, especially with this confident, curiously persuasive variety. There were moments when he almost wondered if there might be something in Radley's delusion. In other circumstances, his natural, healthy skepticism would have protected him, but now, after these days of strain and suspense, his critical faculties were dimmed. He wished there was some neat way of breaking the spell that this glib-tongued maniac was undoubtedly casting.
Half ashamed of the thought, he remembered the quick coup de grace that had put Hans Baldur so neatly to sleep. Without intending to do se-at least, to his conscious knowledge - he caught