Babs nodded.  She didn’t catch the sarcasm.  But she couldn’t think very straight, just now.  She was on the space platform, which was the second most glamorous spot in the universe.  The most glamorous spot, of course, was the moon.

Cochrane hobbled ashore into the platform, having no weight whatever.  He was able to move only by the curious sticky adhesion of his magnetic-soled slippers to the steel floor-plates beneath him.  Or—­were they beneath?  There was a crew member walking upside down on a floor which ought to be a ceiling directly over Cochrane’s head.  He opened a door in a side-wall and went in, still upside down.  Cochrane felt a sudden dizziness, at that.

But he went on, using hand-grips.  Then he saw Dr. William Holden looking greenish and ill and trying sickishly to answer questions from West and Jamison and Bell, who had been plucked from their private lives just as Cochrane had and were now clamorously demanding of Bill Holden that he explain what had happened to them.

Cochrane snapped angrily: 

“Leave the man alone!  He’s space-sick!  If you get him too much upset this place will be a mess!”

Holden closed his eyes and said gratefully: 

“Shoo them away, Jed, and then come back.”

Cochrane waved his hands at them.  They went away, stumbling and holding on to each other in the eerie dream-likeness and nightmarish situation of no-weight-whatever.  There were other passengers from the moon-rocket in this great central space of the platform.  There was a fat woman looking indignantly at the picture of a weighing-scale painted on the wall.  Somebody had painted it, with a dial-hand pointing to zero pounds.  A sign said, “Honest weight, no gravity.” There was the stewardess from the rocket, off duty here.  She smoked a cigarette in the blast of an electric fan.  There was a party of moon-tourists giggling foolishly and clutching at everything and buying souvenirs to mail back to Earth.

“All right, Bill,” said Cochrane.  “They’re gone.  Now tell me why all the not inconsiderable genius in the employ of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe, in my person, has been mobilized and sent up to the moon?”

Bill Holden swallowed.  He stood up with his eyes closed, holding onto a side-rail in the great central room of the platform.

“I have to keep my eyes shut,” he explained, queasily.  “It makes me ill to see people walking on side-walls and across ceilings.”

A stout tourist was doing exactly that at the moment.  If one could walk anywhere at all with magnetic-soled shoes, one could walk everywhere.  The stout man did walk up the side-wall.  He adventured onto the ceiling, where he was head-down to the balance of his party.  He stood there looking up—­down—­at them, and he wore a peculiarly astonished and half-frightened and wholly foolish grin.  His wife squealed for him to come down:  that she couldn’t bear looking at him so.