He clicked off the communicator, and we turned to the port together to watch the little metal sphere that hurtled up out of the darkness past the Luna V. From behind and above us there came a great white flash of atomic fire that must have blinded for the moment every watching eye on Earth. "Right on schedule," Charlie said, and swung the Luna V over the darkside rim and across the mysterious other side of the moon, the hidden hemisphere that no man has ever seen. * * * * * The ship was waiting for us there, a sleek, familiar cylinder with airlock standing open. We went inside and closed the lock and stripped off our cumbersome airsuits, and Charlie flexed his arms and grinned at me. "Lord, I'm glad to get that over with--it's been like nine years of prison!" "It was worth it," I said. I was remembering the grim green world we had left, shivering a little when I considered the brawling simian hordes who battered their way up the scale toward a culture that might, unchecked, some day rule the Universe. "It gives us a few more years before they come swarming down on us with their atomic bombs and politics and their gaping tourists," I said, still using the speech patterns that had been drilled into me for half my life. "We've marked time long enough, hoping for the best. We'll need every minute we've gained to get ready for them." We went forward then to watch the purple-skinned pilot, hairy and many-limbed and beautifully wrinkled, engage the magnetic drive that would send us flashing toward the planet that was home. Later, in our natural bodies, we would speak the name of that world with reverence, but our clumsy synthetic Earth-tongues could not master its lovely sonic extensions, and so we used another term. For the time being, we called it Mars....