And finally, there is some serious science. Nearly a quarter of a century ago there appeared in The Strolling Astronomer, the official organ of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers, a report to the effect that some of the craterlets on the floor of Plato were sometimes visible and sometimes not with the same instrument under apparently identical conditions of atmospheric transparency and seeing. I submitted a very brief paper to the same journal suggesting that electric effects might raise dust from the crater floor, and that this might also account for some anomalous occultation effects reported in the same publication. The suggestion met with a deafening silence in professional circles, but it did provide a story background. In “Dust Rag” I assumed a local Lunar magnetic field to provide a focussing effect for charged particles from the solar wind. Isaac Asimov remarked, when he used the story in an anthology for science teachers, that Hal was wrong; the Moon has no magnetic field. I’ll let history settle that one, but I still think the basic idea has merit. Maybe the charge is friction-generated by landslides down the inner slopes of the Plato ringwall, maybe it’s caused some other way. I’d still like to see something quantitative written about it by a competent physicist. That’s my closest to political writing, so far.
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