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rugged bastions of Ptolemy's mountain wall towered above the plain.
From the blackness above them, a surface transporter was sliding
toward the base on its landing approach.
Eventually Hunt said: "To think-a generation ago, all this was just
desert." It was more a thought voiced than a statement.
Danchekker did not answer for a long time. When he did, he kept his
eyes fixed outside.
"But man dared to dream . . ." he murmured slowly. After a pause he
added, "And what man dares to dream today, tomorrow he makes come
true."
Another long silence followed. Hunt took a cigarette from his case
and lit it. "You know," he said at last, blowing a stream of smoke
slowly toward the glass wall of the dome, "it's going to be a long
voyage to Jupiter. We could get a drink down below-one for the
road, as it were."
Danchekker seemed to turn the suggestion over in his mind for a
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while. At length he shifted his gaze back within the confines of
the dome and turned to face Hunt directly.
"I think not, Dr. Hunt," he said quietly.
Hunt sighed and made as if to turn.
"However, . . ." The tone of Danchekker's voice checked him before
he moved. He looked up. "If your metabolism is capable of
withstanding the unaccustomed shock of nonalcoholic beverages, a
strong coffee might, ah, perhaps be extremely welcome."
It was a joke. Danchekker had actually cracked a joke!
"I'll try anything once," Hunt said as they began walking toward
the door of the elevator.
chapter nineteen
Embarkation on the orbiting Jupiter Five command ship was not
scheduled to take place until a few days later. Danchekker would be
busy making final arrangements for his team and their equipment to
be ferried up from the Lunar surface. Hunt, not being involved in
these undertakings, prepared an itinerary of places to visit during
the free time he had available.
The first thing he did was fly to Tycho by surface transporter to
observe the excavations still going on around the areas of some of
the Lunarian finds, and to meet at last many of the people who up
until then had existed only as faces on display screens. He also
went to see the deep mining and boring operations in progress not
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far from Tycho, where engineers were attempting to penetrate to the
core regions of the Moon. They believed that concentrations of rich
metal-bearing ores might be found there. If this turned out to be
so, within decades the Moon could become an enormous spaceship
factory, where parts prefabricated in processing and forming plants
on the surface would be ferried up for final assembly in Lunar
orbit. The economic advantages of constructing deep-space craft
here and from Lunar materials, without having to lift everything up
out of Earth's gravity pit to start with, promised to be enormous.
Next, Hunt visited the huge radio and optical observatories of
Giordano Bruno on Farside. Here, sensitive receivers, operating
fully shielded from the perpetual interference from Earth, and
gigantic telescopes, freed from any atmosphere and not having to
contend with distortions induced by their own weights, were pushing
the frontiers of the known Universe way out beyond the limits of
their Earth-bound predecessors. Hunt sat fascinated in front of the
monitor screens and resolved planets of some of the nearer stars;
he was shown one nine times the size of Jupiter, and another that
described a crazy figure-eight orbit about a double star. He gazed
deep into the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy, and out at distant
specks on the very threshold of detection. Scientists and
physicists described the strange new picture of the Cosmos that was
beginning to emerge from their work here and explained some of the
exciting advances in concepts of space-time mechanics, which
indicated that feasible methods could be devised for dcforming
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astronomic geodesics in such a way that the limitations once
thought to apply to extreme effective velocities could be avoided.
If so, interstellar travel would become a practical proposition;
one of the scientists confidently predicted that man would cross
the Galaxy within fifty years.
Hunt's final stop brought him back to Nearside-to the base at
Copernicus near which Charlie had been found. Scientists at
Copernicus had been studying descriptions of the terrain over which
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