Cochrane waved his hands at them. They went away, stumbling and holding on to each other in the eerie dream-likeness and nightmarish situation of no-weight-whatever. There were other passengers from the moon-rocket in this great central space of the platform. There was a fat woman looking indignantly at the picture of a weighing-scale painted on the wall. Somebody had painted it, with a dial-hand pointing to zero pounds. A sign said, "_Honest weight, no gravity._" There was the stewardess from the rocket, off duty here. She smoked a cigarette in the blast of an electric fan. There was a party of moon-tourists giggling foolishly and clutching at everything and buying souvenirs to mail back to Earth. "All right, Bill," said Cochrane. "They're gone. Now tell me why all the not inconsiderable genius in the employ of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe, in my person, has been mobilized and sent up to the moon?" Bill Holden swallowed. He stood up with his eyes closed, holding onto a side-rail in the great central room of the platform. "I have to keep my eyes shut," he explained, queasily. "It makes me ill to see people walking on side-walls and across ceilings." A stout tourist was doing exactly that at the moment. If one could walk anywhere at all with magnetic-soled shoes, one could walk everywhere. The stout man did walk up the side-wall. He adventured onto the ceiling, where he was head-down to the balance of his party. He stood there looking up--down--at them, and he wore a peculiarly astonished and half-frightened and wholly foolish grin. His wife squealed for him to come down: that she couldn't bear looking at him so. "All right," said Cochrane. "You're keeping your eyes closed. But I'm supposed to take orders from you. What sort of orders are you going to give?" "I'm not sure yet," said Holden thinly. "We are sent up here on a private job for Hopkins--one of your bosses. Hopkins has a daughter. She's married to a man named Dabney. He's neurotic. He's made a great scientific discovery and it isn't properly appreciated. So you and I and your team of tame scientists--we're on our way to the Moon to save his reason." "Why save his reason?" asked Cochrane cynically. "If it makes him happy to be a crackpot--" "It doesn't," said Holden, with his eyes still closed. He gulped. "Your job and a large part of my practice depends on keeping him out of a looney-bin. It amounts to a public-relations job, a production, with me merely censoring aspects that might be bad for Dabney's psyche. Otherwise he'll be frustrated." "Aren't we all?" demanded Cochrane. "Who in hades does he think he is? Most of us want appreciation, but we have to be glad when we do our work and get paid for it! We--"