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Part III is titled ". . . Contend in Vain?" with the question mark added to provide a suggestion of hope that is ultimately justified by the resolution. The scene is Earth's Universe about a year after Lamont tried to convince Senator Burt that the Pump should be stopped. The narrative is straightforward. Two people traveling on the same vessel arrive on the moon with a group of tourists. One is described only as a middle-aged tourist. The other is Konrad Gottstein, Commissioner-Appointee to the Moon. He was formerly on the staff of Senator Burt and had been assigned an investigation of the Electron Pump for waste and personal profit-taking. The middle-aged tourist makes friends with the Lunarite tour guide Selene, pronounced SELL-uh-nee (Asimov often made a point of how his characters' names were pronounced Gla-DI-a and Da-RI-us come to mind), and arouses her interest by asking to see the Earth-controlled proton synchrotron. |
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Selene is the sexual partner of Lunarite physicist Barron Neville, who is engaged in research later revealed as involved with creating an Electron Pump, or something like it, on the Moon. The Moon has no Electron Pump because the para-Universe will not accept tungsten made available there. Neville hopes to be able to learn enough to initiate an exchange from Earth's Universe rather than depending upon the para-people to do it. He also believes that Earth is conspiring to keep the Electron Pump from the Moon. He asks Selene to see the middle-aged tourist again, to play up to his growing romantic interest in her, and to find out what he is doing on the Moon and why he is interested in the proton synchrotron. |
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Later, after Selene has shown the middle-aged tourist something of life in the man-made tunnels of the Moon (there is some resemblance here to the caverns of the para-world) and reported on their conversations to Neville, Gottstein confronts the middle-aged tourist with knowledge of his identity: he is Benjamin Allan Denison, the once-promising radiochemist whose challenge to Hallam (described in Part I) resulted in Hallam's stubborn pursuit of the plutonium-tungsten exchange, the development of the Electron Pump, and Denison's fall from science into male cosmetics as a result of Hallam's enmity. Denison rose to a vice-presidency, which he has given up to immigrate to the Moon, where he hopes to reestablish himself as a physicist. |
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Gottstein remembers him as a scientist who came to Burt's committee with the theory that Lamont later developed independently. Gottstein obtains Denison's agreement to keep him informed about anything he might discover in his dealings with the Moon scientists. The departing |
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