The big wheel drifted in a sunlit void. Cargo ships snuggled cozily into the vast hub hold. Tiny toy-robots and toy-men who looked, in outspace gear, more like the robots than the robots did, clung to the outer shell, making their way in spiralling circuits around the great rim and the hub, checking, repairing, resealing the scars of cosmic dust and ultra-high-velocity pinpoint pebbles. Inside the ion tubes, geiger-suited crews cleaned and inspected. Fuel shuttles took their turns at the maw of the tanks. In the rim living quarters, crew couches were stripped and sprayed, deodorized, sanitized, and u-vee’d, covered with fresh plastic sheets. A team of two went through inspecting straps and webbing, and buckles. All the routine of the _Messenger’s_ two-day Moonside orbit went on as it always did. Shuttles came and went from and to the three domes. And as routinely as all the rest, magnetic tweezers plucked a thin strip of microfilm from a minute wall hole; a piece of candy offered and accepted was sucked till the candycoat came off the hard center--a pellet precisely shaped and sized to tonguing into the cavity of a false tooth; two men conversed about supplies and schedules, talking fluently meanwhile with their hands. The shuttles went in and out, and before most of the residents of Dollars Dome knew who their guests were--or that they _had_ special guests--the top man in every national delegation at World Dome, plus Dr. Chen and his aides in Plato Crater, knew that _John Wendt_ had come back. They also knew that Wendt had refused to go back into space since his first return from Mars--or that that was what the American government _said_. Now he was brought up, with absolute secrecy--kept in his bunk the whole way--as a prisoner? or for Security reasons? by choice? _why?_--and that a “woman friend” had accompanied him: presumably the American tri-di dancer, Trovi. _Why?_ In at least sixteen different rooms in the three man-made Moon oases, men sat silently asking themselves the same questions, or conferring worriedly with other men about it. In Dollars Dome, the word gradually spread too. And in Dr. Peter Andrew Christensen’s living room, Trovi and Wendt sat sipping wine and coffee, while the Director made small talk and speculated about those sixteen--or more--rooms, and what was going on inside them all. * * * * * “... still headin’ into the wild blue yonder?” It didn’t come out light, the way he’d meant it to. He avoided Lee’s quick look. “You seen any leopards change spots lately, John?” The bastard laughed as if the joke was on himself. Sure. _Yeah. This cat over here, man. Flyin’ tiger turned to pussy-cat. Yeh-man!_