to wait, until the floating dust settled.

Visibility was clearing slowly, and Phillip had long finished his sweeping work, but gravity had only a slight effect on the dust particles so they hung about for hours before falling back to the moon.

Phillip punched in his findings on the computer and waited for it to scan the area for confirmation. It took less that a second to do that.

He had found a square.

Back at base, the latest discovery overshadowed all that had gone before. Now, it seemed, a way into the metal hull had been found, though what lay below of course was still a complete mystery.

"Let's just suppose," conjectured Paul, "That the moon has been enclosed by intelligent creatures? We cannot even guess where these creatures may have come from, or why they would want to build such a structure.

"Let us also suppose that the moon is inside, but for some reason it has been encapsulated by this metal shell. I follow this line because we know the mass and weight of the moon - it cannot be hollow or it would exert radically different forces. If that is the case, there may be some reason to suppose also that they, or whatever made this shell, knew something about Mankind. Now I'm not an Evolutionist, so I cannot agree with John about life evolving out of nothing. Life is too complicated for that, and besides, the normal direction for everything is downwards, from complex to simple, not the other way. In all the thousands of years of human existence, all we have ever seen is reduction of DNA, loss of genes, and mutations, but never the increase of genetic material. Good science actually supports creationism."

"Now, what I'm proposing is that we leave the origin of these hypothetical living creatures out of the discussion. Perhaps we can deal with them later, when we have more information, but not at the moment. So we have these beings, and they decide that the human race is coming along fine, but that, because they are too war-like and primitive, that it is too soon to make any meaningful contact with them?"

"So they build this moon?" said Phillip,

"Exactly!"

"But why?"

"Perhaps so we will discover it in the future, when we are ready to cope with the discovery - when our technology has advanced far enough to find it? Perhaps,