He promised them, in short, the Moon--and, in the end, he got the money. I have never heard a more eloquent speaker. The only time I ever saw him stumped was when one Senator, an amiable, earthy man from Missouri, commented that, “If the good Lord had meant us to get to the Moon, why’d he make it so dagnab fur away?” “But science,” Old Sam declared, “science would find a way.” There were a lot more atoms in the world than there were people, and, as far as Sam was concerned, what the atoms did was more important. Now, perhaps, you begin to know a little about Old Sam. True, he was not exactly a likeable man. Dedicated men like that seldom are. But I guess Old Sam really went a mite too far. After spending a lot of his lifetime in a laboratory, he was certainly a one-sided man. If a thing wasn’t done scientifically, it wasn’t done at all, for Sam. Fortunately, he had no children. If he had had kids, he was the kind of man who would have spared the love and spoiled the child. All his emotional interest was bound up in space flight. Which, considering what happened, must have made subsequent events really rough on him. At any rate, he got his money and built the satellite station _and_ the space-ship. They were four years in the building, and then, one July, he took off for the Moon. I don’t suppose there was a man on Earth who didn’t know about Old Sam’s trip, and there were very few people who weren’t excited about Man’s first step into space. It was a great moment, a dramatic moment. There were television cameras mounted on Old Sam’s ship beaming it all back to Earth. At least fifty million people were following Old Explorer Sam and his crew on their spectacular journey. So, one morning, as Sam finally began to maneuver for the Lunar landing, he was already a monumental hero. Newspaper reporters all over the world had been busy for months, writing about the hazards of the trip, about the deathly cold of outer space, about collisions with mountainous meteors and cosmic death rays. But Old Sam had merely sniffed smugly for the cameras. “Everything has been considered,” he reassured the press, “we have foreseen every detail.” So the papers painted him as a vast man, calm, unworried, going off into the illimitable dark, on the greatest of all explorations. No doubt, Old Sam _was_ a great man--in his way. All eyes were on him, as he went in for Man’s first landing on the Moon. The TV cameras were focussed upon him, as he gave the orders for the landing, standing proud and triumphant in a spotless white cap and gilded uniform. There was a great bump, the picture leaped and blurred for a moment, while fifty million breaths were held, and then you could almost hear the cheers rising up from all over Earth. The Moonship was finally down--down and safe. What a moment!