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category.
    “You’d almost think, wouldn’t you,” said Matthews, “that the house was ready to take
     off at any moment. It’s a complete mock-up, of course, of ‘Alpha’s’ control room.
     I’ve seen them training on it, and it’s fascinating to watch even if you don’t quite
     know what it’s all about.”
    Dirk gave a somewhat forced laugh.
    “It’s a bit eerie, coming across a spaceship control panel in a quiet London suburb.”
    “It won’t be quiet next week. We’re throwing it open to the Press then, and we’ll
     probably be lynched for keeping all this under cover so long.”
    “Next week?”
    “Yes, if everything goes according to plan. ‘Beta’ should have passed her final full-speed
     tests by then, and we’ll all be packing our trunks for Australia. By the way, have
     you seen those films of the first launchings?”
    “No.”
    “Remind me to let you see them—they’re most impressive.”
    “What’s she done so far?”
    “Four and a half miles a second with full load. That’s a bit short of orbital speed,
     but everything was still working perfectly. It’s a pity, though, that we can’t test
     ‘Alpha’ before the actual flight.”
    “When will that be?”
    “It’s not fixed yet, but we know that the take-off will be when the Moon’s entering
     her first quarter. The ship will land in the Mare Imbrium region while it’s still
     early morning. The return’s scheduled for the late afternoon, so they’ll have about
     ten Earth-days there.”
    “Why the Mare Imbrium, in particular?”
    “Because it’s flat, very well mapped, and has some of the most interesting scenery
     on the Moon. Besides, spaceships have
always
landed there since Jules Verne’s time. I guess that you know that the name means
     ‘Sea of Rains.’”
    “I did know Latin pretty thoroughly once upon a time,” Dirk said dryly.
    Matthews came as near a smile as he had ever known him to.
    “I suppose you did. But let’s get out of here before we’re caught. Seen enough?”
    “Yes, thanks. It’s a bit overwhelming, but not so very much worse than a transcontinental
     jet’s cockpit.”
    “It is if you know what goes on behind all those panels,” said Matthews grimly. “Arnold
     Clinton—that’s the electronics king—once told me that there are three thousand tubes
     in the computing and control circuits alone. And there must be a good many hundreds
     on the communications side.”
    Dirk scarcely heard him. He was beginning to realize, for the first time, how swiftly
     the sands were running out. When he had arrived a fortnight ago, the take-off still
     seemed a remote event in the indefinite future. That was the general impression in
     the outside world; now it seemed completely false. He turned to Matthews in genuine
     bewilderment.
    “Your Public Relations Department,” he complained, “seems to have misled everyone
     pretty efficiently. What’s the idea?”
    “It’s purely a matter of policy,” replied the other. “In the old days we had to talk
     big and make spectacular promises to attract any attention at all. Now we prefer to
     say as little as possible until everything’s cut and dried. It’s the only way to avoid
     fantastic rumors and the resulting sense of anticlimax. Do you remember the KY 15?
     She was the first manned ship to reach an altitude of a thousand miles—but months
     before she was ready everyone thought that we were going to send her to the Moon.
     They were disappointed, of course, when she did exactly what she’d been designed for.
     So nowadays I sometimes call my office the ‘Department of Negative Publicity.’ It
     will be quite a relief when the whole thing’s over and we can go into forward gear
     again.”
    This, thought Dirk, was a very self-centered outlook. It seemed to him that the five
     men he had just been watching had far better reasons for wishing that the “whole thing
     was over.”

Five
    “So far,” wrote Dirk in his Journal that