"Our first rocket was ready by the summer of '59. We named it the Marilyn—after Marilyn Monroe, the top glamour gal of those days. And I was in the ship's first crew.
"Our take-off wasn't like this circus today. No music, no speeches, no parades. We had a shot of brandy in the morning. We shook hands with our friends and puffed on cigarettes and the C.O. said a prayer. Then we took off."
Jeffrey weighed words and memories in his mind. "It'd take me a year to tell about how space looks and how the moon is; and how you feel when all the things you love are in a cloud-wrapped ball 240,000 miles away. Or how it feels to see your buddies slip through the paper-thin crust that covers parts of the moon and go down into nothingness, just as if the hand of God wiped them out of the universe.
"Anyway, we hit the moon. The ship stayed long enough for us to build a dome. Then we split the crew in half. Five stayed, the rest shuttled back to Earth for more supplies. Three months later the second rocket, the June Randy, was ready, and life got a little easier. We began to get an occasional case of beer and mail from home. Our families thought they were writing to Pandora City. To think that those little three-cent letters would go all the way to Luna would have seemed a lunatic's dream to them.
"By the summer of '61 Project Pandora was completed. We had two domes and four launching stations, each a hundred miles apart. The missiles on the launching platforms were like those beds of nails the yogis are supposed to lie on—only a hundred times bigger. And each nail was a uranium-lithium-tritium-headed rocket.
"1961 slipped by, and '62 and '63. There were a few aborted revolutions on earth, a few moments of tension, but no war."
A veil of loneliness seemed to fall over his vision, separating him from his listener.
"Go ahead," the man prompted him.
"Well, new faces appeared in our crews. The older fellows were given memory-washes so they wouldn't start blabbing when they returned to Earth. Psychiatry was pretty primitive in those days. The treatment wasn't much more than hypnosis, creating an artificial psychic block in their minds. After a while, it seemed like men were coming and going like figures on a treadmill—but, me, I stayed on."
"You stayed on? Why?"