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remember.”
    “We appreciate your help: let us know if you find anything else.”
    Down in Clavius City, the Tourist Commissioner heard Lawson’s report with resignation.
     That settled it; the next-of-kin had better be notified. It was unwise, if not impossible,
     to maintain secrecy any longer.
    He turned to the Traffic Control officer and asked: “Is that passenger list in yet?”
    “Just coming over the Telefax from Port Roris. Here you are.” As he handed over the
     flimsy sheet he said inquisitively: “Anyone important aboard?”
    “
All
tourists are important,” said the Commissioner coldly, without looking up. Then,
     in almost the same breath, he added. “Oh, my God!”
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Commodore Hansteen’s aboard.”
    “
What
? I didn’t know he was on the Moon.”
    “We’ve kept it quiet. We thought it was a good idea to have him on the Tourist Board,
     now that he’s retired. He wanted to have a look around,
incognito
, before he made up his mind.”
    There was a shocked silence as the two men considered the irony of the situation.
     Here was one of the greatest heroes of space—lost as an ordinary tourist in some stupid
     accident in Earth’s back-yard, the Moon….
    “That may be very bad luck for the Commodore,” said the Traffic Controller at last.
     “But it’s good luck for the passengers—if they’re still alive.”
    “They’ll need all the luck they can get, now the Observatory can’t help us,” said
     the Commissioner.
    He was right on the first point, but wrong on the second. Dr. Tom Lawson still had
     a few tricks up his sleeve.
    And so did Father Vincent Ferraro, S. J., a scientist of a very different kind. It
     was a pity that he and Tom Lawson were never to meet; the resulting fireworks would
     have been quite interesting. Father Ferraro believed in God and Man; Dr. Lawson believed
     in neither.
    The priest had started his scientific career as a geophysicist, then switched worlds
     and became a selenophysicist—though that was a name he used only in his more pedantic
     moments. No man alive had a greater knowledge of the Moon’s interior, gleaned from
     batteries of instruments strategically placed over the entire surface of the satellite.
    Those instruments had just produced some rather interesting results. At 19 hours 35
     minutes 47 seconds G.M.T., there had been a major quake in the general area of the
     Bay of Rainbows; that was a little surprising, for the area was an unusually stable
     one, even for the tranquil Moon. Father Ferraro set his computers to work pin-pointing
     the focus of the disturbance, and also instructed them to search for any other anomalous
     instrument readings. He left them at this task while he went to lunch, and it was
     here that his colleagues told him about the missing
Selene
.
    No electronic computer can match the human brain at associating apparently irrelevant
     facts. Father Ferraro only had time for one spoonful of soup before he had put two
     and two together and had arrived at a perfectly reasonable but disastrously misleading
     answer.

CHAPTER FIVE
    “—and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the position,” concluded Commodore Hansteen.
     “We’re in no immediate danger, and I haven’t the slightest doubt that we’ll be located
     quite soon. Until then, we have to make the best of it.”
    He paused, and swiftly scanned the upturned, anxious faces. Already he had noted the
     possible trouble spots—that little man with the nervous tic, the acidulous, prune-faced
     lady who kept twisting her handkerchief in knots. Maybe they’d neutralise each other,
     if he could get them to sit together….
    “Captain Harris and I—he’s the boss, I’m only acting as his adviser—have worked out
     a plan of action. Food will be simple and rationed, but will be adequate, especially
     as you won’t be engaged in any physical activity. We would like to ask some of the
     ladies to help Miss Wilkins—she’ll have a lot of