In the morning Super Queen-Mother went up to the terrace and looked down.
The sun, coming out from behind the mountain, lit the still sleeping town.
Cars were rolling on the roads by easy stages, taking their masters to work.
Janitors were finishing their morning street cleaning.
Dump trucks were following their usual routes.
Sometimes, barely audible alarm signals reached her when sellers opened the doors of their shops.
Super Queen-Mother looked at the far corner of the bay.
A train was noiselessly emerging from the tunnel. Braking on at the station, it whistled, warning absent-minded, sleepy passengers about the approaching danger.
Super Queen-Mother looked over the bay again. She liked what she saw.
“Let it always be so”, she thought and went down to the living room.
She invited the security officer in and commanded him to gather all the specialists of her team intended for support of her activity as the Mistress of Earth. She appointed a meeting with them for the next day, at ten sharp.
In the meantime, Super Queen-Mother decided to fly to the Moon. Nobody knew about this – people thought she stayed alone to have a rest before the hard work.
So as not to attract the attention of her guard to her private trip to the Moon she decided not to use the starship, allocated to her by the Galaxy, and waiting for her in the ravine, behind the “dog ground”.
Super Queen-Mother went to the terrace, pressed her arms to her body and zoomed up. The roof of the house and the town remained miles behind. She thought that at such speed it was unlikely that anybody saw even her shadow.
Having overcome the earth’s gravitational force, she viewed the space around her.
The near space was littered with orbiting garbage. Various debris – worn out and outdated satellites, written off and operating unannounced flying machines, launched by different countries at different times, were floating here and there.
Super Queen-Mother defined this as one more urgent problem – cleaning the local space.
She mentally represented the future terrestrial-space grouping of spaceships. They had to be tracking ships, independently regulating their location and capable to avoid straight-line impact with any kinds of bodies.
All flying cosmic equipment had to be integrated into the Single Control System.
However, to substitute this stuff for new equipment, the cosmic space had to be first quickly cleaned; otherwise, temporary absence of artificial satellites, necessary for economic activity, might cause catastrophes on Earth.
Further on, her flight went on without delay or hindrance.
The Moon was becoming larger and larger, covering the whole sky dome.
Super Queen-Mother took to the other, dark side of the Moon, which had never showed itself to the earthly people.
Her flight was not long, and soon she was grounding the surface of the Orb of Night, near her hidden treasures.
The dusty asteroids did not distinguish themselves from the surroundings. They began to sparkle and shine only when Super Queen-Mother had cleaned some small areas on them with her hand.
She counted the approximate volume of rich ore her spaceship could take to Earth at a time and grouped the asteroids according to her calculations. She did not need to disguise the asteroids again – no one ship would go into space without her order.
She only had to make arrangements with the corresponding enterprises and then to transfer the asteroids to Earth.
She again looked over her treasures, then rose three miles up and embarked on the second part of her task.
She wanted to answer some questions:
– Why did the Moon drone like a bell when her asteroids hit it during their landfall on it?
– Why is the dark side of the Moon never seen?
– Why does not its celestial motion comply with the law of free movement of bodies in space?
– Who adjusts its motion?
– Why is its orbit a circle and not an ellipse, as in other cosmic bodies, moreover that its gravitational center is shifted towards Earth for more than a mile?
– Why are its craters shallow? Is its rock denser? Then, why does its density equal only 60% of the earthly one? Is it hollow?
– Or, is it a galaxy ship put out of service?
Questions, questions, questions…
Super Queen-Mother started to fly around the Moon. The moon landscapes spellbound her with its emptiness and quietness.
Super Queen-Mother was flying at great speed; nevertheless, she had time to look over everything unusual on the Moon’s surface. There were many queer things.
She flew over huge, seventy-foot high blocks, cut, polished and set inside the crater.
Ruins of an old town inside a meteorite crater surprised her. It was a square with a side more than one and a half mile long.
Super Queen-Mother divided everything she saw into dangerous and interesting things. She did not ask herself what they were and how they had appeared there. Super Queen-Mother just registered in her memory that they were on the Moon.
She flew over big semitransparent castles, long pipelines, arches and bridges.
Super Queen-Mother saw pits and gaps.
One of them resembled a heel print, sixty-eighty feet deep.
There were also huge pits with right angles, looking like commercial developments of mineral ore.
She flew over enormous, strange constructions, scattered in disorder.
She saw many interesting things on the Moon’s surface, but could not compare them to the dangerous ones.
The only thing that alerted Super Queen-Mother was a cave two hundred feet in diameter. She did not find any other holes on the Moon.
Super Queen-Mother decided to examine it. She landed and came up to its entrance. Its dark walls were fire-polished and smooth, without any visible sag. The rough floor was homogeneous lunar rock, melted into a single mass.
Super Queen-Mother came into the cave. The first one hundred feet of the passage were straight, and then it curved, leading inside the planet. It resembled the caverns on Earth, left by magma streams.
