They cost thousands their sanity and millions their lives. They did something to the moon, too.

So we might begin this story anywhere — with Wolf Loner in the mid-Atlantic, or Fritz Scher in Germany, or Richard Hillary in Somerset, or Arab Jones smoking weed in Harlem, or Barbara Katz sneaking around Palm Beach in a black playsuit, or Sally Harris hunting her excitement in the environs of New York, or Doc Brecht selling pianos in L.A., or Charlie Fulby lecturing about flying saucers, or General Spike Stevens understudying the top role in the U.S. Space Force, or Rama Joan Huntington interpreting Buddhism, or with Bagong hung in the South China Sea, or with Don Merriam at Moonbase U.S., or even with Tigran Biryuzov orbiting Mars. Or we could begin it with Tigerishka or Miaow or Ragnarok or the President of the United States. But because they were close to that first center of unease near Los Angeles, and because of the crucial part they were to play in the story, we will begin with Paul Hagbolt, a publicist employed by Project Moon; and with Margo Gelhorn, fiancйe of one of the four young Americans who had soared to Moonbase U.S., and with Margo’s cat Miaow, who had a very strange journey ahead of her; and with the four photographs, though they were then only an eerie, top-secret mystery rather than a trumpeting menace; and with the moon, which was about to slide into the ambiguous gleam-haunted darkness of eclipse.

Margo Gelhorn, coming out on the lawn, saw the full moon halfway up the sky. Earth’s satellite was as vividly three-dimensional as a mottled marble basketball. Its pale gold hue fitted the weather rarity of a balmy Pacific Coast evening.

“There’s the bitch up there now,” Margo said.

Paul Hagbolt, emerging through the door behind her, laughed uneasily. “You really do think of the moon as a rival.”