"Good!" Frank shouted back, glad that this large, unsure person had found himself a leader.
Now he looked at Gimp Hines, riding the spinning rim of his ring with his good and bad leg dangling, an expectant, quizzical, half-worried look on his freckled face.
But Dave Lester was more pathetic. He had stopped the rotation of his bubb. He looked down first at the pitted, jagged face of the Moon, with an expression in which rapture and terror may have been mingled, glanced with the hope of desperation toward the job scout, and then distractedly continued dismantling the rigging of his vehicle, as if to repack it in the blastoff drum for a landing.
"Hey—hold on, Les!" Two-and-Two shouted. "You gotta know where you're going, first!"
"Make up your mind, Nelsen," said the job scout, getting impatient. "We handle just about everything lunar—except in the Tovie areas. Without us, you're just a lost, fresh punk!"
But another man had approached from another lunar GO rocket, which had just appeared. He had a thin intellectual face, dark eyes, trap mouth, white hair, soft speech that was almost shy.
"I'm Xavier Rodan," he said. "I search out my own employees. I do minerals survey—for gypsum, bauxite—anything. And site survey, for factories and other future developments. I also have connections with the Selenographic Institute of the University of Chicago. It is all interesting work, but in a rather remote region, I'm afraid—the far side of the Moon. And I can pay only three hundred a week. Of course you can resign whenever you wish. Perhaps you'd be interested—Mr. Nelsen, is it?"
Frank had an impulse to jump at the chance—though there was a warning coming to him from somewhere. But how could you ever know? You would always have to go down to that devils' wilderness to find out.
"I'll try it, Mr. Rodan," he said.
"Selenography—that's one of my favorite subjects, sir!" David Lester burst out, making a gingerly leap across the horrible void of spherical sky—stars in all directions except where the Moon's bulk hung. "Could I—too?" His trembling mouth looked desperate.