“I’ll wait awhile,” Sadler answered. “Remember, this is all new to me and I don’t want to miss any of it.”

Molton laughed, not unkindly. “Can’t say I blame you,” he said. “Afraid we sometimes take things for granted.”

The monorail was now sliding down an absolutely vertiginous incline that would have been suicide on Earth. The cold, greenlit plain lifted to meet them: a range of low hills, dwarfs beside the mountains they had left behind, broke the skyline ahead. Once again, the uncannily near horizon of this little world began to close in upon them. They were back at “sea” level. …

Sadler followed Molton through the curtains and into the cabin, where the steward was setting out trays for his small company.

“Do you always have as few passengers as this?” asked Sadler. “I shouldn’t think it was a very economical proposition.”

“Depends what you mean by economical,” Molton replied. “A lot of the things here will look funny on your balance sheets. But it doesn’t cost much to run this service. Equipment lasts forever—no rust, no weather. Cars get serviced only every couple of years.”

That was something Sadler certainly hadn’t considered. There were a great many things he had to learn, and some of them he might find out the hard way.

The meal was tasty but unidentifiable. Like all food on the Moon, it would have been grown in the great hydroponic farms that sprawled their square kilometers of pressurized greenhouses along the equator. The meat course was presumably synthetic: it might have been beef, but Sadler happened to know that the only cow on the Moon lived in luxury at the Hipparchus Zoo. This was the sort of useless information his diabolically retentive mind was always picking up and refusing to disgorge.