Jim looked at him steadily and shrugged without answer. Hennesey was one guy whose presence on the space team Jim couldn't figure out. He was an ex-Major, and he had no capacity for dreaming. Men, machines, transistors, rockets—they were all the same thing, merely objects to be made to obey.
"You are aware of your next sequence of duties, I trust?" said Hennesey.
Jim nodded curtly. "I'll be ready."
Sixty-six hours to the moon. That's what it takes with marginal escape velocity and free-fall conditions. But it was really five hundred thousand years and sixty-six hours, Jim thought. Surely there hadn't been a single hour in all that time when someone, somewhere on earth had not felt the longing to solve the secret mystery of the moon.
Now they were about to find the answer. But what would they have when they found it? They would know that the surface dust of the moon consisted of certain percentages of silicates and oxides. They would know that the under layers were composed of rocks, maybe of granite or limestone or basalt. They would determine how much of each.
And then it would be over. The quest of the ages would be answered with a few simple statements that could be obtained in any high-school chemistry lab—if the lab were on the moon.
Jim Cochran felt there had to be more to it than that.
Why do dogs howl at the moon on winter nights?
Why do men say that madness of the mind is lunacy?