"Shall I keep the engines running?" he asked. "Our uranium is getting low, I'm afraid. The gage indicates that over seventy per cent has been used." "Troubles never come singly!" exclaimed the master of the Ring. "Here we are, going we don't know where, gravitating around the moon, perhaps, and our fuel giving out! We've got to get a fresh cylinder into the tractor to get back, and it will be bad business making the change in space. We ought to land and make repairs and get a fresh start with new bearings." "Land?" gasped Rhoda, in astonishment. "Where?" "On the moon, of course. It's only ten thousand miles away, and we're headed straight for her, apparently. Turn her over again, Burke, and we'll slow down. It's going to be ticklish business, but I don't see what else we can do. We may go to smash and we may not. It all depends on whether we have time to overcome our velocity before we get there. We could slue off and run by, of course, but our uranium might give out, and then what should we do? Anyhow, there's no time to be lost." Yet, accustomed as Rhoda now was to supernormal situations and surroundings, Bennie's practical suggestion of landing on the moon, which, after all, was the one celestial body with which they were at all familiar, seemed utterly inconceivable of execution. "The moon!" she repeated vaguely. "The moon!" She had seen the moon off and on with the greatest regularity for nearly thirty years--had photographed it, drawn pictures of it, made calculations about it, and read all sorts of fanciful yarns concerning it and its imaginary inhabitants. She really knew a good deal about it and could call some of its mountains and dried-up seas by name--Copernicus, for instance, and Tycho--but she had never taken it seriously--had regarded it rather as a sort of stage-setting for the earth. Thus, when Bennie proposed, almost casually, to set foot on what had hitherto been nothing more than an abstraction or figure of speech, it left her uncomprehending. She had always associated the moon with harvest-fields, straw-rides, weddings, and green cheese. There was a "man in the moon," a "lady in the moon" and "two children carrying a pail" up there--in it. That was the moon of her childhood and when she was "off duty"--the real moon. The other one--the imaginary moon, far less real in every respect--was the one she knew in her work--a dead world of pitted craters, dry oceans, marked with strange, shining furrows and concentric circles, just so many thousand miles from the earth and having regular habits that could be absolutely relied upon. That was not the real moon at all. The genuine moon, as far as she was concerned, was the old-fashioned one--that cast its yellow light over pumpkin-sprinkled fields and down leafy lanes, or rose like a huge red lantern out of a sparkling blue-black ocean. The real moon signified coon-hunting, fried chicken, banjos, and "Merrily We Roll Along." The