Rodan indicated a large, Archer-clad man, who also carried an automatic. He had the face of a playful but dangerous mastiff. He was hunkered down in a shallow pit, scanning the ground with a watch-sized device probably intended for locating objects hidden just beneath the surface, electronically. Beside him was a screen-bottomed container, no doubt meant for sifting dust.
"Greetings, Novices!" he gruffed with genial contempt. But his pale eyes, beyond the curve of his helmet, had a masked puzzlement, as if something from the lunar desolation had gotten into his brain, leaving the realization of where he was, permanently not altogether clear to him.
Rodan pulled a shiny object from his thigh pouch, and held it out in a gloved palm for his new employees to peer at.
"One of the things we found," he remarked. "Incomplete. If we could, for instance, locate the other parts..."
Frank saw a little cylinder, with grey coils wrapped inside it—a power chamber, perhaps, to be lined with magnetic force, the only thing that could contain what amounted to a tiny twenty-million degree piece of a star's hot heart. It was a familiar principle for releasing and managing nuclear power. But the device, perhaps part of a small weapon, was subtly marked by the differences of another technology.
"I believe I have said enough," Rodan stated with a thin smile. "Though some facts will be unavoidably obvious to you, working here. But at least I will let you figure them out for yourselves, since you are well-informed young men, by your own statement." Here Rodan looked hard at the pale, unsteady Lester. "We will go back, now, so I can show you the camp, its routine, and your place in it. We have three domes—garden and living quarters, with a workshop and supply dome between them..."
Quarters proved to be okay—two bunks and the usual compact accessories.
"Leave your Archers in the lockers outside your door—here are your keys," Rodan suggested. "Helen will have a meal [p. 62] ready for you in the adjacent dining room. Afterwards, take a helpful tranquilizer, and sleep. No work until you awaken. I shall leave you, now..."
It was a good meal—steak cultured and grown in a nourishing solution, on the Moon, perhaps at Serene, much as Dr. Alexis Carrel had long ago grown and kept for years a living fragment of a chicken's heart. Potatoes, peas and tomatoes, too—all had become common staples in hydroponic gardens off the Earth.
"What do you make of what Rodan was talking about, Les?" Frank asked conversationally.