Undoubtedly, counter-espionage was strengthened correspondingly--and with just as little effect on the Red Dome itself as the USAA move had on life at Playfair. Not till the orbiting of the _Messenger_, the giant wheel of space that rode the great ellipse from a 12,000-mile orbit around Earth out to the convenient dropping-distance of the Moon, carrying shuttle-ships of all three domes, was there the kind of intergrouping that breeds espionage. In eighteen months of operation, the _Messenger_ had already started to acquire an aura of the sort of glamour that once permeated Istanbul, Paris, Lisbon, and Rome, complete with agents, counter-agents, and double agents. Congressional apprehension had increased sharply when it was finally admitted, less than a year after the _Messenger_ went up, that the whole spectrum of psychogenic and psychosomatic ailments plaguing the dwellers on the Moon could be relieved by nothing less than a month-long quarterly rest leave on Earth. For a time, there was even talk of “rest camps” and “recreation centers” where top-secret Moon Dome scientists could take their rehabilitation leaves on Earth. But public distaste for the idea prevailed--and the original Congressional fears dissolved almost out of shape when, 32 months after its unheralded departure, the _Lenin_ failed to make its scheduled return. By that time--Christmas, 1973--the _Colombo_ was six months out, en route to Mars. And when a strenuous Intelligence effort confirmed that the Soviet ship was really lost (and not just secretly arrived), Dr. Christensen did not hesitate to remind the genial Congressmen that he _had_ Told Them So, three years earlier, when he explained his failure to alert anyone to the possibility of a Red Mars-trip in the spring of ’71. The fact was he had assumed his opposite number would wait, as he was doing, for the next A-orbit date, in June ’73, so as to gain the advantages that might accrue from the results of the ISC Observatory’s studies during the close Mars opposition of ’71. _After_ the fact, he remembered that Chen had been faced with an extra intangible that had not troubled him: the history of Soviet “firsts.” From Sputnik I on up through the first Moon-landing, SUAR (or USSR) rocket men had been first. The Party Chairman desired to keep it that way--so the _Lenin_ left first. But the _Colombo_ came back. It came back with no news of the Red ship. And it came back with one man instead of two. _Dollars Dome--January 12, 1976_ Johnny Wendt was the one who came back. They met him with cheers and rejoicing, welcomed him home with music and medals and speeches on worldwide video beamed from the bunting-draped central square of the United States Moon Dome.