The story opens with Effie at a shuttered window, her husband's voice cutting through her 'terrified rapture' as she watches a green moon. The contrast between her dreamy description—'green as emeralds, green as leaves with sunshine striking through them'—and his command to 'close the shutters at once' establishes a central conflict: the pull of beauty versus the compulsion of survival. Leiber immediately grounds this in physical detail: the 'ponderous lead inner shutters' that hurt her fingers, the 'eternal thud of the air-conditioning fans,' and the Geiger counter that must be used to 'count' oneself for contamination. The domestic setting is both a refuge and a prison, and the prose shifts between Effie's interior longing and the harsh, mechanical routines of her life.

The Ritual of Counting

Leiber turns a Geiger counter into a prop of psychological drama. The act of 'counting yourself' is a repeated, almost ceremonial procedure: Effie 'combed her body with the instrument' in movements that are 'oddly voluptuous' despite her 'gray and sagging' features. The ticking accelerates when she reaches her waist—only to reveal a radium-dial wristwatch, not contamination. This false alarm builds tension and underscores the paranoid vigilance of the household. Later, when the stranger Patrick is asked to count, the counter's clicks mount 'like the chatter of a pigmy machine gun,' shifting to a scaling circuit where each click stands for 512. The horror is not just the radiation but the way the device dictates human worth and fear. The ritual exposes the characters' dependencies: Hank's need for control, Effie's suppressed rebellion, and Patrick's dangerous ambiguity.

Beauty as a Threat

Effie's longing for the green moon is framed as both aesthetic and erotic. The face she sees is 'faunlike, pleading, cajoling, tempting, and incredibly beautiful.' Her husband's response—'You know that those shutters are not to be touched!'—equates looking with dying: 'Only wanted to die like a little fool.' The story suggests that beauty itself has become hazardous, something to be shuttered away. Effie's secret appreciation of the moon is an act of defiance, and her later transformation—Hank sees 'for the first time how beautiful she had become'—links her newfound radiance to her exposure to the outside. Yet the text leaves ambiguous whether this beauty is genuine or a symptom of contamination. Leiber uses sensory language—'green as a beer bottle,' 'green as leaves'—to make the forbidden world vivid, while the interior remains 'grubby, stale,' and filled with the 'bite of a dentist's drill.'

The Stranger's Ambiguous Testimony

Patrick arrives as a messenger of hope, claiming the dust is harmless and that those who stayed outside 'adapted' and 'changed for the better.' Effie embraces his words as liberation: 'We no longer need to fear the dust.' But Leiber undercuts this optimism with careful details. Patrick's face is 'strangely veiled, as if he were calculating obscure changes'; his voice is 'like a fencer's foil—light, bright, alert, constantly playing, yet utterly on guard.' When tested with the Geiger counter, his radiation levels spike catastrophically. The narrative does not reveal whether he is lying, deluded, or something else entirely. Effie's confidence—'Test Patrick here'—leads directly to the counter's chatter, and the story ends before the consequences unfold. The reader is left with the tension between Effie's radiant belief and the instrument's damning evidence, a gap that Leiber refuses to close.

Leiber's story works through compression: a single room, three characters, and a Geiger counter generate a world of fear and desire. The green moon is never explained, and the dust's true nature remains ambiguous. Readers should attend to the physical details—the weight of the shutters, the sound of the fans, the rhythm of the counter—as they carry the emotional weight. The ending, cut short in the excerpt, leaves Effie's fate and the truth of Patrick's claims unresolved, inviting speculation grounded in the text's own contradictions.