"Well?" Hamner said. "What do we do? Go home?"
It was said half as a joke, but I saw from the look on young Leo Mickens' face that he was perfectly willing to take the suggestion seriously and get off Pollux V as fast as he could.
To forestall any trouble, I said, "It's a tempting idea. But I don't think it would look good on our records."
"You're right," Hamner agreed. "We stay. We stay until we know what that thing is, where it came from, and how we can lick it."
We stayed. We spent the rest of that day aboard ship, having called off the day's explorations in memory of Max. The bright orb of Pollux set about 2000 ship time, and the sky was filled with a glorious sight: a horde of moons whirling above. The moons of Pollux V were incredible.
There were one hundred of them, ranging in size from a hunk of rock the size of Mars' Deimos to one massive high-albedo satellite almost a thousand miles in diameter. They marched across the sky in stately order, filling the Polluxian night with brightness.
Only we didn't feel much sense of wonder. We buried Max in a crude grave, laid him to rest under the light of a hundred moons, and then withdrew to the ship to consider our problem.
"Where'd it come from?" Doc Graves asked.
"Nowhere," I said. "Just nowhere. One second it wasn't there, next second it was. It vanished the same way."