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finest and, indeed, the only meteor display ever to take place entirely at sea level….
    ‘I’m sorry that this story hasn’t got a happy ending. In fact, it hasn’t got an ending at all, because that sphere of zero gravitational potential is still sitting there in the Australian desert, apparently doing nothing at all but in fact producing ever increasing amounts of frustration in scientific and official circles. I don’t see how the authorities can hope to keep it secret much longer. Sometimes I think how odd it is that the world’s tallest mountain is in Australia—and that though it’s four thousand miles high the airliners often fly right over it without knowing it’s there.’
    You will hardly be surprised to hear that H. Purvis finished his narration at this point, even he could hardly take it much further, and no one wanted him to. We were all, including his most tenacious critics, lost in admiring awe. I have since detected six fallacies of a fundamental nature in his description of Dr Cavor’s Frankensteinian fate but at the time they never even occurred to me. (And I don’t propose to reveal them now. They will be left, as the mathematics textbooks put it, as an exercise for the reader.) What had earned our undying gratitude, however, was the fact that at some slight sacrifice of truth he had managed to keep Flying Saucers from invading the ‘White Hart’. It was almost closing time, and too late for our visitor to make a counterattack.
    That is why the sequel seems a little unfair. A month later, someone brought a very odd publication to one of our meetings. It was nicely printed and laid out with professional skill, the misuse of which was sad to behold. The thing was called Flying Saucer Revelations —and there on the front page was a full and detailed account of the story Purvis had told us. It was printed absolutely straight—and what was much worse than that, from poor Harry’s point of view, was that it was attributed to him by name.
    Since then he has had 4,375 letters on the subject, most of them from California. Twenty-four called him a liar; 4,205 believed him absolutely. (The remaining ones he couldn’t decipher and their contents still remain a matter of speculation.)
    I’m afraid he’s never quite got over it, and I sometimes think he’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to stop people believing the one story he never expected to be taken seriously.
    There may be a moral here. For the life of me I can’t find it.

Venture to the Moon
    First published in the London Evening Standard , 1956
    Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

    ‘Venture to the Moon’ was originally written as a series of six independent but linked stories for the London Evening Standard , in 1956. When the commission was first proposed I turned it down. It appeared impossible to write stories in only 1,500 words which would be understandable to a mass readership despite being set in a totally alien environment, but on second thought this seemed such an interesting challenge that I decided to tackle it. The resulting series was successful enough to demand a second…

    The Starting Line
    The story of the first lunar expedition has been written so many times that some people will doubt if there is anything fresh to be said about it. Yet all the official reports and eyewitness accounts, the on-the-spot recordings and broadcasts never, in my opinion, gave the full picture. They said a great deal about the discoveries that were made—but very little about the men who made them.
    As captain of the Endeavour and thus commander of the British party, I was able to observe a good many things you will not find in the history books, and some—though not all—of them can now be told. One day, I hope, my opposite numbers on the Goddard and the Ziolkovski will give their points of view. But as Commander Vandenburg is still on Mars and Commander Krasnin is somewhere inside the orbit of Venus, it looks as if we