In both cases, the official designations of the smaller domes stated something less than the whole truth. Certainly, valuable scientific researches into the properties and effects of near-zero and near-vacuum were being pursued, eagerly, in the Red Dome. Just as surely, extra-terrestrial phenomena were being studied with active interest inside Dollars Dome. But the primary purposes of the two national labs were somewhat less academic than the “pure” scientific research which, for the most part, motivated the mixed crews of physicists, chemists, and astronomers in the big World Dome. There was just one objective that could have induced either the USAA or the SUAR to finance and maintain experimental scientific bases more than a quarter of a million miles out from under the quivering noses of, respectively, the Congressional Committees and the Politburo. In his stronghold far out of sight beyond the Lunar Appenines, some 1500 miles from the United States of All Americas Dome in Playfair Crater, Dr. Chen Lian-Tsu was occupied just as busily as was Dr. Peter Andrew Christensen in Dollars Dome with the application of known physical, chemical, and astronomical data to the specific political-economic-imperial requirements of practical space-flight (tomorrow ... for _our_ side). In the surface matters of dress and taste, preference in food, sport, and language, as well as national allegiance, the two men were worlds apart. In the basics of personality both of them were so well suited to the similar jobs they held that they were almost absurdly alike--even to the fact that neither (though both were in their mid-forties) had ever married. They were the kind of men who “marry their work”; but, unlike others _almost_ of their own type, both had avoided entanglement in arid marriages to which they could bring no real emotions. Their passions were already committed, wholly and without reserve, to the great dream of Space: of _man_ in Space. For these two, the immediate physical world, the Earth, was already abandoned; and from the perspective of an inward life based in the universe-at-large, either one could see with tragic clarity the narrow limits and uses of the old, little, world. They understood well enough the need of _other_ men for competitive glories. They understood profit-and-loss and its importance to other _other_-men. And they knew perfectly well that for the non-imperial realities of the UN or the ISC there was _no_ economic, political, or social need for space flight.