"An instrument station on the moon could communicate with the earth with greater ease than one on Mars or Venus." It was not necessary to circle around Larry or go to Paris, to Mexico. At last she was a receptor for Larry's messages!

"To investigators preoccupied with the remarkable developments in contemporary astronomy and physics the moon had seemed a dead and changeless world."

But only because she had not looked beyond the mask. The rim of density around Larry had been his goodness. It was selfless, almost anonymous. He was present only when summoned, and summoned only by distress. Lillian had fixed the distorted image, but Larry had contributed the mask.

"The moon is an astronomical stone. Because its surface has preserved the record of ancient events, it holds the key to the solar system."

The key to the marriage? Larry had achieved changelessness.

Whereas Lillian was created "out of the air and water that support life on earth which continuously wear away the surface of our planets. Processes in the interior of the earth heave up chains of mountains for demolition by the forces of erosion, and the cycles of building and erosion from one epoch to the next erase the records of the past." That was a portrait of Lillian's turbulences in planetary terms! And of Larry's conservation of the past, of their life together.

"The moon, on the other hand, has neither atmosphere nor oceans, and has never been eroded by wind and water. Furthermore, the circular formations that dominate the moon's topography indicate that its crust has never undergone the violent changes which are involved in mountain-building processes on earth. "

Larry had sought to present such an undisturbed surface to Lillian's investigations. But this evenness had been as much a mask as Sabina's more theatrical disguises. What do you feel? Where are you? Will you share my enthusiasms? My friendships?

What had sent Larry so far away from human life into the position of a spectator, so far away from earth? What had made him wrap himself in an unbreathable atmosphere of selflessness and then be absent from his own body? There were incidents she knew. But she had never coordinated them. She was landing for the first time on this new planet, Larry. "In any case, a planet would be cool at birth." His mother had not wanted him to be born. This was the first denial. He had arrived unsummoned by love and jealously resented by his father.

"A cool birth does not exclude the later heating and melting of planetary bodies by radioactive elements they contain."

The child, inhibited by such "a cool birth," sought warmth by running away from home to the huts of the Negroes living and working nearby for his father. His father was drilling oil wells in Brazil for an American firm.