“We tear a gateway where no gate has ever been,” he said, nodding at the mechanisms, “in a wall we didn’t build. That’s called scientific investigation. Then we send men through the gate. That’s the human adventure. And something on the other side — something that never bothered mankind; something that’s never done us any harm before or troubled us with the knowledge that it was there — kills them. In terrible ways we can’t understand, it kills them. So I keep sending in more men. What’s that called, Sam?”

“Ed, we are making progress. This new approach is going to be the answer.”

Hawks looked curiously at Latourette.

Latourette said uncomfortably, “Once we get the bugs out of it. That’s all it needs. It’s the thing that’ll do the trick, Ed — I know it.”

Hawks did not change his expression or turn his face away. He stood with his fingertips forced against the machine’s gray crackle finish. “You mean — we’re no longer killing them? We’re only driving them insane with it?”

“All we have to do, Ed,” Latourette pressed him, “all we have to do is find a better way of cushioning the shock when the man feels his death. More sedatives. Something like that.”

Hawks said, “They still have to go into that place. How they do it makes no difference; it won’t tolerate them. It was never made for human beings to have anything to do with. It was never made for the human mind to measure in human terms. We have to make a new language for describing it, and a new way of thinking in order to be able to understand it. Only when we’ve finally got it apart, whatever it is, and seen, and felt, and touched and tasted all its pieces, will we ever be able to say what it might be. And that will only be after we’ve been through it, so what good will our new knowledge do these men who have to die, now? Whatever put it there, no matter why, no human being will ever be able to live in it until after human beings have lived through it. How are you going to describe that in plain English so a sane man can understand it? It’s a monstrous thing we’re dealing with. In a sense, we have to think like monsters, or stop dealing with it, and let it just sit there on the Moon, no one knows why.”