"Maybe you're right, fella," he growled.
"Of course I am!" Arnold almost snapped. "My father believed it for years, and his work must go on, even though the Forbidden Moon scares me plenty. You saw yourself, Harwich, that his Energy Barrage Penetrator was almost successful. I've been trying to build another, with enough power to get through."
Harwich's lips curved, a nameless, wild thrill stirring in his blood. But after all, even before he'd left a great consolidated farm in southern Illinois nine years ago, to become a spaceman, he'd been an adventurer at heart.
"Do you suppose you'll need any help?" he asked simply, realizing that even as he spoke, death on a tomb-world might well be lurking in the background.
The question sounded like impulse, but it wasn't. Harwich had lived too long in the shadow of the Forbidden Moon's taunting enigma, not to want to take a personal part in any effort to penetrate its grim secrets. Besides, he had a month's furlough from patrol duty now. The thought of possible adventures to come made his nerves tingle.
Paul Arnold's eyes widened. "I almost hoped you would want to join me, Harwich," he stammered happily, seeming only to need the moral support of an experienced spaceman, to bring him out of the black mood he was in. "Shall we go to my laboratory?"
The Arnold lab and dwelling proved to be one of the oddest that Evan Harwich had ever seen. It was just outside the great steel-ribbed airdrome that confined a warm, breatheable atmosphere over Ganymede City, the small mining metropolis of a dying world.
The Arnold lab was a group of subterranean rooms, beneath the desert. They were reached by a private tunnel from the City, and were hermetically sealed against leakage of air to the cold semi-vacuum of the Ganymedean atmosphere above.
Cellar rooms, vaults, not exactly modern but restored from some ancient ruin; for Ganymede had had its extinct clans of quasihuman people too, ages ago. A weird place, this was, a place of poverty, perhaps, since all of the Arnold resources must have gone into experimentation; but a homey sort of place, too, with its scatterings of books and quaint art objects and pictures.