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co-operative venture—but think of the prestige if we got there first. It need only be by a couple of hours….
    I was shocked at the suggestion, and said so. By this time Vandenburg and Krasnin were good friends of mine, and we were all in this together. I made every excuse I could and said that since our flight paths had already been computed there wasn’t anything that could be done about it. Each ship was making the journey by the most economical route, to conserve fuel. If we started together, we should arrive together—within seconds.
    Unfortunately, someone had thought of the answer to that. Our three ships, fuelled up and with their crews standing by, would be circling earth in a state of complete readiness for several hours before they actually pulled away from their satellite orbits and headed out to the moon. At our five-hundred-mile altitude, we took ninety-five minutes to make one circuit of the Earth, and only once every revolution would the moment be ripe to begin the voyage. If we could jump the gun by one revolution, the others would have to wait that ninety-five minutes before they could follow. And so they would land on the moon ninety-five minutes behind us.
    I won’t go into the arguments, and I’m still a little ashamed that I yielded and agreed to deceive my two colleagues. We were in the shadow of Earth, in momentary eclipse, when the carefully calculated moment came. Vandenburg and Krasnin, honest fellows, thought I was going to make one more round trip with them before we all set off together. I have seldom felt a bigger heel in my life than when I pressed the firing key and felt the sudden thrust of the motors as they swept me away from my mother world.
    For the next ten minutes we had no time for anything but our instruments, as we checked to see that the Endeavour was forging ahead along her precomputed orbit. Almost at the moment that we finally escaped from Earth and could cut the motors, we burst out of shadow into the full blaze of the sun. There would be no more night until we reached the moon, after five days of effortless and silent coasting through space.
    Already Space Station Three and the two other ships must be a thousand miles behind. In eighty-five more minutes Vandenburg and Krasnin would be back at the correct starting point and could take off after me, as we had all planned. But they could never overcome my lead, and I hoped they wouldn’t be too mad at me when we met again on the moon.
    I switched on the rear camera and looked back at the distant gleam of the space station, just emerging from the shadow of Earth. It was some moments before I realised that the Goddard and the Ziolkovski weren’t still floating beside it where I’d left them….
    No; they were just half a mile away, neatly matching my velocity. I stared at them in utter disbelief for a second, before I realised that every one of us had had the same idea. ‘Why, you pair of double-crossers!’ I gasped. Then I began to laugh so much that it was several minutes before I dared call up a very worried Earth Control and tell them that everything had gone according to plan—though in no case was it the plan that had been originally announced….
    We were all very sheepish when we radioed each other to exchange mutual congratulations. Yet at the same time, I think everyone was secretly pleased that it had turned out this way. For the rest of the trip, we were never more than a few miles apart, and the actual landing manoeuvres were so well synchronised that our three braking jets hit the moon simultaneously.
    Well, almost simultaneously. I might make something of the fact that the recorder tape shows I touched down two-fifths of a second ahead of Krasnin. But I’d better not, for Vandenburg was precisely the same moment ahead of me.
    On a quarter-of-a-million-mile trip, I think you could call that a photo finish….
    Robin Hood, F.R.S.
    We had landed early in the dawn of the long lunar day, and the slanting