Bryan Kimberly looked with satisfaction at the two-page, four-color advertisement in the magazine on his desk. He leaned back in his chair to get a better perspective. A beautiful piece of art work, the illustration showed a bulbous suited spaceman halfway inside the main tube of one of the ponderous lunar freights. The dazzling streamers of light from his torch illumined the black bore of the tube, to which he was applying an emergency reline patch.
All this against the platinum Moonscape and the black night of space above. Beside the workman stood two companions, watching.
That was nice the way they were arranged, Kimberly thought. One showed the front of the spacesuit; the other gave a clear view of the rear, showing the minimum of equipment which the wearer was required to support.
Blazoned across the bottom of the picture, like a rocket trail going up, was the caption: "Only in a Kimberly can you do this!"
Bryan Kimberly settled deeper in the chair to read contentedly. "Since the first thrust-jet reached escape velocity, Kimberly has meant — freedom! Freedom to leave the prison of the ships that carry men across space, freedom to make the Moon's surface as familiar as our own home towns. Kimberly is the suit that has made the animal, man, adaptable to an environment for which he was never meant. The first human footprint upon the lunar surface was made in a Kimberly. Since then, nearly twenty thousand of these superb spacesuits have carried the pioneers of a new age into the realms of the stars.
"Now, we announce a new and improved Kimberly suit that means even greater freedom, ease, and safely in man's eternal quest to reach out and touch the stars!"
Bryan Kimberly pinched his lower lip thoughtfully. That had looked pretty good in script when he'd first read it. Now, in his pages of "Rocket Flight," it seemed just a trifle too purple. Oh, well — nobody could blame the company for going overboard on this new suit. It was good.
He read on. "For the first time, spacemen are offered an all-fabric suit. In weight alone, this means a reduction of thirty-eight pounds, Earth. The new plastic, Cordolite, of which the carcass is constructed, is conservatively rated at an inflation pressure of three hundred pounds per square inch.
"Most important of all, however, is the tremendous, epoch-making invention, the Kimberly Joint. It is with the utmost pride that we present this new joint to the spacemen of the world.