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imaginative minds rose the specter of an attack upon Earth by the nonliving forces of the moon. The military sectors’ inability to exchange information might be only temporary. The sectors might learn to communicate through ground tremors, seismically, making the vibrations in the rock look like natural moonquakes. The self-engineered and self-improving weapons might all join and one day unleash their monstrous power against Earth, Why should they want to do this? How would it benefit a nonliving army to reduce Earth to ashes? It wouldn’t, of course, but cancer, everpresent in the organisms of higher animals and human beings, is an inevitable albeit disadvantageous consequence of evolution. People began to talk and write about this lunar cancer, and there were seminars, articles, novels, and films on the subject, and the fear of atomic annihilation, which had been dispelled on Earth, returned in a new form. The surveillance system included seismographs, and certain scientists reported that the frequency of tremors in the moon’s crust was increasing, and seismic readings were analyzed for hidden codes, and fear grew. To calm the public, the Lunar Agency said in communiqués that the odds of this happening were one in two hundred million, but no one believed that calculation. The fear finally reached the politicians, and they began to demand periodic inspection of the sectors and not just of their borders. The Agency spokesmen explained that any such inspection could not rule out the possibility of espionage to learn the current state of the lunar arsenals. After long meetings and complex negotiation the LA finally received authorization to reconnoiter.
    Reconnaissance, it turned out, wasn’t so easy. None of the probes returned. Not a peep from them by radio. Specially armored landers were sent, with television cameras. The observation satellite showed that they indeed landed, and exactly on target, in the Mare Imbrium, in the Mare Frigoris, in the Mare Nectaris, and in the no man’s land between the sectors. But not one of them sent back a picture. As if the ground of the moon had swallowed them. Understandably, this caused panic. A state of emergency. The papers urged that the moon be preemptively bombed with hydrogen bombs just to play it safe. But that couldn’t happen unless a missile was built and atomic warheads again manufactured. Out of this fear and confusion my mission was born.
    We were flying above thick clouds, their mounds tinged with pink from the morning sun still hidden below the horizon. Why, I wondered, did I remember the terrestrial things so well, while remembering so little of what happened on the moon? I knew some reasons. It wasn’t for nothing that I’d read all those medical books when I got back. There are two kinds of memory, temporary and permanent. Severing the great commissure does not affect what the brain has already accumulated, but fresh memories evaporate, do not become permanent. What evaporates particularly is what the patient experienced shortly before the operation. Therefore I didn’t remember most of what happened to me those seven weeks on the moon, when I went from sector to sector. All that remained in my head was an aura of strangeness, nothing I could put into words, into a report. Strangeness, and yet it was not threatening, or so it seemed to me. No dark conspiracy against Earth. I felt certain of that. But could I swear that what I felt and knew was the whole story? Perhaps It knew more.
    Tarantoga was silent, only glancing at me from time to time. As usual on eastward flights, with the Pacific beneath us, the calendar tripped and dropped a day. BOAC was belt-tightening, apparently, because all we got to eat was chicken salad. We landed in Miami. It was early in the afternoon. Customs dogs sniffed our suitcases. We stepped out into the heat. Melbourne had been much cooler. A rental car was waiting for us; Tarantoga must have ordered it in Melbourne. We put our