The Project Gutenberg eBook, Operation: Outer Space, by William Fitzgerald
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Title: Operation: Outer Space


Author: William Fitzgerald Jenkins



Release Date: May 10, 2006  [eBook #18361]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


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OPERATION: OUTER SPACE

by

MURRAY LEINSTER







CHAPTER ONE


Jed Cochrane tried to be cynical as the helicab hummed softly through
the night over the city. The cab flew at two thousand feet, where
lighted buildings seemed to soar toward it from the canyons which were
streets. There were lights and people everywhere, and Cochrane
sardonically reminded himself that he was no better than anybody else,
only he'd been trying to keep from realizing it. He looked down at the
trees and shrubbery on the roof-tops, and at a dance that was going on
atop one of the tallest buildings. All roofs were recreation-spaces
nowadays. They were the only spaces available. When you looked down at a
city like this, you had cynical thoughts. Fourteen million people in
this city. Ten million in that. Eight in another and ten in another
still, and twelve million in yet another ... Big cities. Swarming
millions of people, all desperately anxious--so Cochrane realized
bitterly--all desperately anxious about their jobs and keeping them.

"Even as me and I," said Cochrane harshly to himself. "Sure! I'm shaking
in my shoes right along with the rest of them!"

But it hurt to realize that he'd been kidding himself. He'd thought he
was important. Important, at least, to the advertising firm of Kursten,
Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe. But right now he was on the way--like a
common legman--to take the moon-rocket to Lunar City, and he'd been
informed of it just thirty minutes ago. Then he'd been told casually to
get to the rocket-port right away. His secretary and two technical men
and a writer were taking the same rocket. He'd get his instructions from
Dr. William Holden on the way.

A part of his mind said indignantly, "_Wait till I get Hopkins on the
phone! It was a mixup! He wouldn't send me off anywhere with the
Dikkipatti Hour depending on me! He's not that crazy!_" But he was on
his way to the space-port, regardless. He'd raged when the message
reached him. He'd insisted that he had to talk to Hopkins in person
before he obeyed any such instructions. But he was on his way to the
space-port. He was riding in a helicab, and he was making adjustments in
his own mind to the humiliation he unconsciously foresaw. There were
really three levels of thought in his mind. One had adopted a defensive
cynicism, and one desperately insisted that he couldn't be as
unimportant as his instructions implied, and the third watched the other
two as the helicab flew with cushioned booming noises over the dark
canyons of the city and the innumerable lonely lights of the rooftops.

There was a thin roaring sound, high aloft. Cochrane jerked his head
back. The stars filled all the firmament, but he knew what to look for.
He stared upward.

One of the stars grew brighter. He didn't know when he first picked it
out, but he knew when he'd found it. He fixed his eyes on it. It was a
very white star, and for a space of minutes it seemed in no wise
different from its fellows. But it grew brighter. Presently it was very
bright. It was brighter than Sirius. In seconds more it was brighter
than Venus. It increased more and more rapidly in its brilliance. It
became the brightest object in all the heavens except the crescent moon,
and the cold intensity of its light was greater than any part of that.
Then Cochrane could see that this star was not quite round. He could
detect the quarter-mile-long flame of the rocket-blast.

It came down with a rush. He saw the vertical, stabbing pencil of light
plunge earthward. It slowed remarkably as it plunged, with all the
flying aircraft above the city harshly lighted by its glare. The
space-port itself showed clearly. Cochrane saw the buildings, and the
other moon-rockets waiting to take off in half an hour or less.

The white flame hit the ground and splashed. It spread out in a wide
flat disk of intolerable brightness. The sleek hull of the ship which
still rode the flame down glinted vividly as it settled into the inferno
of its own making.

Then the light went out. The glare cut off abruptly. There was only a
dim redness where the space-port tarmac had been made incandescent for a
little while. That glow faded--and Cochrane became aware of the
enormous stillness. He had not really noticed the rocket's deafening
roar until it ended.

The helicab flew onward almost silently, with only the throbbing pulses
of its overhead vanes making any sound at all.

"_I kidded myself about those rockets, too_," said Cochrane bitterly to
himself. "_I thought getting to the moon meant starting to the stars.
New worlds to live on. I had a lot more fun before I found out the facts
of life!_"

But he knew that this cynicism and this bitterness came out of the hurt
to the vanity that still insisted everything was a mistake. He'd
received orders which disillusioned him about his importance to the firm
and to the business to which he'd given years of his life. It hurt to
find out that he was just another man, just another expendable. Most
people fought against making the discovery, and some succeeded in
avoiding it. But Cochrane saw his own self-deceptions with a savage
clarity even as he tried to keep them. He did not admire himself at all.

The helicab began to slant down toward the space-port buildings. The sky
was full of stars. The earth--of course--was covered with buildings.
Except for the space-port there was no unoccupied ground for thirty
miles in any direction. The cab was down to a thousand feet. To five
hundred. Cochrane saw the just-arrived rocket with tender-vehicles
running busily to and fro and hovering around it. He saw the rocket he
should take, standing upright on the faintly lighted field.

The cab touched ground. Cochrane stood up and paid the fare. He got out
and the cab rose four or five feet and flitted over to the waiting-line.

He went into the space-port building. He felt himself growing more
bitter still. Then he found Bill Holden--Doctor William Holden--standing
dejectedly against a wall.

"I believe you've got some orders for me, Bill," said Cochrane
sardonically. "And just what psychiatric help can I give you?"

Holden said tiredly:

"I don't like this any better than you do, Jed. I'm scared to death of
space-travel. But go get your ticket and I'll tell you about it on the
way up. It's a special production job. I'm roped in on it too."

"Happy holiday!" said Cochrane, because Holden looked about as miserable
as a man could look.

He went to the ticket desk. He gave his name. On request, he produced
identification. Then he said sourly:

"While you're working on this I'll make a phone-call."

He went to a pay visiphone. And again there were different levels of
awareness in his mind--one consciously and defensively cynical, and one
frightened at the revelation of his unimportance, and the third finding
the others an unedifying spectacle.

He put the call through with an over-elaborate confidence which he
angrily recognized as an attempt to deceive himself. He got the office.
He said calmly:

"This is Jed Cochrane. I asked for a visiphone contact with Mr.
Hopkins."

He had a secretary on the phone-screen. She looked at memos and said
pleasantly:

"Oh, yes. Mr. Hopkins is at dinner. He said he couldn't be disturbed,
but for you to go on to the moon according to your instructions, Mr.
Cochrane."

Cochrane hung up and raged, with one part of his mind. Another part--and
he despised it--began to argue that after all, he had better wait before
thinking there was any intent to humiliate him. After all, his orders
must have been issued with due consideration. The third part disliked
the other two parts intensely--one for raging without daring to speak,
and one for trying to find alibis for not even raging. He went back to
the ticket-desk. The clerk said heartily:

"Here you are! The rest of your party's already on board, Mr. Cochrane.
You'd better hurry! Take-off's in five minutes."

Holden joined him. They went through the gate and got into the
tender-vehicle that would rush them out to the rocket. Holden said
heavily:

"I was waiting for you and hoping you wouldn't come. I'm not a good
traveller, Jed."

The small vehicle rushed. To a city man, the dark expanse of the
space-port was astounding. Then a spidery metal framework swallowed the
tender-truck, and them. The vehicle stopped. An elevator accepted them
and lifted an indefinite distance through the night, toward the stars. A
sort of gangplank with a canvas siderail reached out across emptiness.
Cochrane crossed it, and found himself at the bottom of a spiral ramp
inside the rocket's passenger-compartment. A stewardess looked at the
tickets. She led the way up, and stopped.

"This is your seat, Mr. Cochrane," she said professionally. "I'll strap
you in this first time. You'll do it later."

Cochrane lay down in a contour-chair with an eight-inch mattress of foam
rubber. The stewardess adjusted straps. He thought bitter, ironic
thoughts. A voice said:

"Mr. Cochrane!"

He turned his head. There was Babs Deane, his secretary, with her eyes
very bright. She regarded him from a contour-chair exactly opposite his.
She said happily:

"Mr. West and Mr. Jamison are the science men, Mr. Cochrane. I got Mr.
Bell as the writer."

"A great triumph!" Cochrane told her. "Did you get any idea what all
this is about? Why we're going up?"

"No," admitted Babs cheerfully. "I haven't the least idea. But I'm going
to the moon! It's the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me!"

Cochrane shrugged his shoulders. Shrugging was not comfortable in the
straps that held him. Babs was a good secretary. She was the only one
Cochrane had ever had who did not try to make use of her position as
secretary to the producer of the Dikkipatti Hour on television. Other
secretaries had used their nearness to him to wangle acting or dancing
or singing assignments on other and lesser shows. As a rule they lasted
just four public appearances before they were back at desks, spoiled for
further secretarial use by their taste of fame. But Babs hadn't tried
that. Yet she'd jumped at a chance for a trip to the moon.

A panel up toward the nose of the rocket--the upper end of this
passenger compartment--glowed suddenly. Flaming red letters said,
"_Take-off, ninety seconds._"

Cochrane found an ironic flavor in the thought that splendid daring and
incredible technology had made his coming journey possible. Heroes had
ventured magnificently into the emptiness beyond Earth's atmosphere.
Uncountable millions of dollars had been spent. Enormous intelligence
and infinite pains had been devoted to making possible a journey of two
hundred thirty-six thousand miles through sheer nothingness. This was
the most splendid achievement of human science--the reaching of a
satellite of Earth and the building of a human city there.

And for what? Undoubtedly so that one Jed Cochrane could be ordered by
telephone, by somebody's secretary, to go and get on a passenger-rocket
and get to the moon. Go--having failed to make a protest because his
boss wouldn't interrupt dinner to listen--so he could keep his job by
obeying. For this splendid purpose, scientists had labored and dedicated
men had risked their lives.

Of course, Cochrane reminded himself with conscious justice, of course
there was the very great value of moon-mail cachets to devotees of
philately. There was the value of the tourist facilities to anybody who
could spend that much money for something to brag about afterward. There
were the solar-heat mines--running at a slight loss--and various other
fine achievements. There was even a nightclub in Lunar City where one
highball cost the equivalent of--say--a week's pay for a secretary like
Babs. And--

The panel changed its red glowing sign. It said: "_Take-off forty-five
seconds._"

Somewhere down below a door closed with a cushioned soft definiteness.
The inside of the rocket suddenly seemed extraordinarily still. The
silence was oppressive. It was dead. Then there came the whirring of
very many electric fans, stirring up the air.

The stewardess' voice came matter-of-factly from below him in the
upended cylinder which was the passenger-space.

"We take off in forty-five seconds. You will find yourself feeling very
heavy. There is no cause to be alarmed. If you observe that breathing is
oppressive, the oxygen content of the air in this ship is well above
earth-level, and you will not need to breathe so deeply. Simply relax in
your chair. Everything has been thought of. Everything has been tested
repeatedly. You need not disturb yourself at all. Simply relax."

Silence. Two heart-beats. Three.

There was a roar. It was a deep, booming, numbing roar that came from
somewhere outside the rocket's hull. Simultaneously, something thrust
Cochrane deep into the foam-cushions of his contour-chair. He felt the
cushion piling up on all sides of his body so that it literally
surrounded him. It resisted the tendency of his arms and legs and
abdomen to flatten out and flow sidewise, to spread him in a thin layer
over the chair in which he rested.

He felt his cheeks dragged back. He was unduly conscious of the weight
of objects in his pockets. His stomach pressed hard against his
backbone. His sensations were those of someone being struck a hard,
prolonged blow all over his body.

It was so startling a sensation, though he'd read about it, that he
simply stayed still and blankly submitted to it. Presently he felt
himself gasp. Presently, again, he noticed that one of his feet was
going to sleep. He tried to move it and succeeded only in stirring it
feebly. The roaring went on and on and on....

The red letters in the panel said: "_First stage ends in five seconds._"

By the time he'd read it, the rocket hiccoughed and stopped. Then he
felt a surge of panic. He was falling! He had no weight! It was the
sensation of a suddenly dropping elevator a hundred times multiplied. He
bounced out of the depression in the foam-cushion. He was prevented from
floating away only by the straps that held him.

There was a sputter and a series of jerks. Then he had weight again as
roarings began once more. This was not the ghastly continued impact of
the take-off, but still it was weight--considerably greater weight than
the normal weight of Earth. Cochrane wiggled the foot that had gone to
sleep. Pins and needles lessened their annoyance as sensation returned
to it. He was able to move his arms and hands. They felt abnormally
heavy, and he experienced an extreme and intolerable weariness. He
wanted to go to sleep.

This was the second-stage rocket-phase. The moon-rocket had blasted off
at six gravities acceleration until clear of atmosphere and a little
more. Acceleration-chairs of remarkably effective design, plus the
pre-saturation of one's blood with oxygen, made so high an acceleration
safe and not unendurable for the necessary length of time it lasted.
Now, at three gravities, one did not feel on the receiving end of a
violent thrust, but one did feel utterly worn out and spent. Most people
stayed awake through the six-gravity stage and went heavily to sleep
under three gravities.

Cochrane fought the sensation of fatigue. He had not liked himself for
accepting the orders that had brought him here. They had been issued in
bland confidence that he had no personal affairs which could not be
abandoned to obey cryptic orders from the secretary of a boss he had
actually never seen. He felt a sort of self-contempt which it would have
been restful to forget in three-gravity sleep. But he grimaced and held
himself awake to contemplate the unpretty spectacle of himself and his
actions.

The red light said: "_Second stage ends ten seconds._"

And in ten seconds the rockets hiccoughed once more and were silent, and
there was that sickening feeling of free fall, but he grimly made
himself think of it as soaring upward instead of dropping--which was the
fact, too--and waited until the third-stage rockets boomed suddenly and
went on and on and on.

This was nearly normal acceleration; the effect of this acceleration was
the feel of nearly normal weight. He felt about as one would feel in
Earth in a contour-chair tilted back so that one faced the ceiling. He
knew approximately where the ship would be by this time, and it ought to
have been a thrill. Cochrane was hundreds of miles above Earth and
headed eastward out and up. If a port were open at this height, his
glance should span continents.

No.... The ship had taken off at night. It would still be in Earth's
shadow. There would be nothing at all to be seen below, unless one or
two small patches of misty light which would be Earth's too-many great
cities. But overhead there would be stars by myriads and myriads, of
every possible color and degree of brightness. They would crowd each
other for room in which to shine. The rocket-ship was spiralling out and
out and up and up, to keep its rendezvous with the space platform.

The platform, of course, was that artificial satellite of Earth which
was four thousand miles out and went around the planet in a little over
four hours, traveling from west to east. It had been made because to
break the bonds of Earth's gravity was terribly costly in fuel--when a
ship had to accelerate slowly to avoid harm to human cargo. The space
platform was a filling station in emptiness, at which the moon-rocket
would refuel for its next and longer and much less difficult journey of
two hundred thirty-odd thousand miles.

The stewardess came up the ramp, moving briskly. She stopped and glanced
at each passenger in each chair in turn. When Cochrane turned his open
eyes upon her, she said soothingly:

"There's no need to be disturbed. Everything is going perfectly."

"I'm not disturbed," said Cochrane. "I'm not even nervous. I'm perfectly
all right."

"But you should be drowsy!" she observed, concerned. "Most people are.
If you nap you'll feel better for it."

She felt his pulse in a businesslike manner. It was normal.

"Take my nap for me," said Cochrane, "or put it back in stock. I don't
want it. I'm perfectly all right."

She considered him carefully. She was remarkably pretty. But her manner
was strictly detached. She said:

"There's a button. You can reach it if you need anything. You may call
me by pushing it."

He shrugged. He lay still as she went on to inspect the other
passengers. There was nothing to do and nothing to see. Travellers were
treated pretty much like parcels, these days. Travel, like television
entertainment and most of the other facilities of human life, was
designed for the seventy-to-ninety-per-cent of the human race whose
likes and dislikes and predilections could be learned exactly by
surveys. Anybody who didn't like what everybody liked, or didn't react
like everybody reacted, was subject to annoyances. Cochrane resigned
himself to them.

The red light-letters changed again, considerably later. This time they
said: "_Free flight, thirty seconds._"

They did not say "free fall," which was the technical term for a rocket
coasting upward or downward in space. But Cochrane braced himself, and
his stomach-muscles were tense when the rockets stopped again and stayed
off. The sensation of continuous fall began. An electronic speaker
beside his chair began to speak. There were other such mechanisms beside
each other passenger-chair, and the interior of the rocket filled with a
soft murmur which was sardonically like choral recitation.

"_The sensation of weightlessness you now experience_," said the voice
soothingly, "_is natural at this stage of your flight. The ship has
attained its maximum intended speed and is still rising to meet the
space platform. You may consider that we have left atmosphere and its
limitations behind. Now we have spread sails of inertia and glide on a
wind of pure momentum toward our destination. The feeling of
weightlessness is perfectly normal. You will be greatly interested in
the space platform. We will reach it in something over two hours of free
flight. It is an artificial satellite, with an air-lock our ship will
enter for refueling. You will be able to leave the ship and move about
inside the Platform, to lunch if you choose, to buy souvenirs and mail
them back and to view Earth from a height of four thousand miles through
quartz-glass windows. Then, as now, you will feel no sensation of
weight. You will be taken on a tour of the space platform if you wish.
There are rest-rooms--._"

Cochrane grimly endured the rest of the taped lecture. He thought sourly
to himself: "_I'm a captive audience without even an interest in the
production tricks._"

Presently he saw Bill Holden's head. The psychiatrist had squirmed
inside the straps that held him, and now was staring about within the
rocket. His complexion was greenish.

"I understand you're to brief me," Cochrane told him, "on the way up. Do
you want to tell me now what all this is about? I'd like a nice dramatic
narrative, with gestures."

Holden said sickly:

"Go to hell, won't you?"

His head disappeared. Space-nausea was, of course, as definite an
ailment as seasickness. It came from no weight. But Cochrane seemed to
be immune. He turned his mind to the possible purposes of his journey.
He knew nothing at all. His own personal share in the activities of
Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe--the biggest advertising agency in
the world--was the production of the Dikkipatti Hour, top-talent
television show, regularly every Wednesday night between eight-thirty
and nine-thirty o'clock central U. S. time. It was a good show. It was
among the ten most popular shows on three continents. It was not
reasonable that he be ordered to drop it and take orders from a
psychiatrist, even one he'd known unprofessionally for years. But there
was not much, these days, that really made sense.

In a world where cities with populations of less than five millions were
considered small towns, values were peculiar. One of the deplorable
results of living in a world over-supplied with inhabitants was that
there were too many people and not enough jobs. When one had a good job,
and somebody higher up than oneself gave an order, it was obeyed. There
was always somebody else or several somebodies waiting for every job
there was--hoping for it, maybe praying for it. And if a good job was
lost, one had to start all over.

This task might be anything. It was not, however, connected in any way
with the weekly production of the Dikkipatti Hour. And if that
production were scamped this week because Cochrane was away, he would be
the one to take the loss in reputation. The fact that he was on the moon
wouldn't count. It would be assumed that he was slipping. And a slip was
not good. It was definitely not good!

"_I could do a documentary right now_," Cochrane told himself angrily,
"_titled 'Man-afraid-of-his-job.' I could make a very authentic
production. I've got the material!_"

He felt weight for a moment. It was accompanied by booming noises. The
sounds were not in the air outside, because there was no air. They were
reverberations of the rocket-motors themselves, transmitted to the
fabric of the ship. The ship's steering-rockets were correcting the
course of the vessel and--yes, there was another surge of power--nudging
it to a more correct line of flight to meet the space platform coming up
from behind. The platform went around the world six times a day, four
thousand miles out. During three of its revolutions anybody on the
ground, anywhere, could spot it in daylight as an infinitesimal star,
bright enough to be seen against the sky's blueness, rising in the west
and floating eastward to set at the place of sunrise.

There was again weightlessness. A rocket-ship doesn't burn its
rocket-engines all the time. It runs them to get started, and it runs
them to stop, but it does not run them to travel. This ship was floating
above the Earth, which might be a vast sunlit ball filling half the
universe below the rocket, or might be a blackness as of the Pit.
Cochrane had lost track of time, but not of the shattering effect of
being snatched from the job he knew and thought important, to travel
incredibly to do something he had no idea of. He felt, in his mind, like
somebody who climbs stairs in the dark and tries to take a step that
isn't there. It was a shock to find that his work wasn't important even
in the eyes of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe. That he didn't
count. That nothing counted ...

There was another dull booming outside and another touch of weight. Then
the rocket floated on endlessly.

A long time later, something touched the ship's outer hull. It was a
definite, positive clanking sound. And then there was the gentlest and
vaguest of tuggings, and Cochrane could feel the ship being maneuvered.
He knew it had made contact with the space platform and was being drawn
inside its lock.

There was still no weight. The stewardess began to unstrap the
passengers one by one, supplying each with magnetic-soled slippers.
Cochrane heard her giving instructions in their use. He knew the
air-lock was being filled with air from the huge, globular platform. In
time the door at the back--bottom--base of the passenger-compartment
opened. Somebody said flatly:

"Space platform! The ship will be in this air-lock for some three hours
plus for refueling. Warning will be given before departure. Passengers
have the freedom of the platform and will be given every possible
privilege."

The magnetic-soled slippers did hold one's feet to the spiral ramp, but
one had to hold on to a hand-rail to make progress. On the way down to
the exit door, Cochrane encountered Babs. She said breathlessly:

"I can't believe I'm really here!"

"I can believe it," said Cochrane, "without even liking it particularly.
Babs, who told you to come on this trip? Where'd all the orders come
from?"

"Mr. Hopkins' secretary," said Babs happily. "She didn't tell me to
come. I managed that! She said for me to name two science men and two
writers who could work with you. I told her one writer was more than
enough for any production job, but you'd need me. I assumed it was a
production job. So she changed the orders and here I am!"

"Fine!" said Cochrane. His sense of the ironic deepened. He'd thought he
was an executive and reasonably important. But somebody higher up than
he was had disposed of him with absent-minded finality, and that man's
secretary and his own had determined all the details, and he didn't
count at all. He was a pawn in the hands of firm-partners and assorted
secretaries. "Let me know what my job's to be and how to do it, Babs."

Babs nodded. She didn't catch the sarcasm. But she couldn't think very
straight, just now. She was on the space platform, which was the second
most glamorous spot in the universe. The most glamorous spot, of course,
was the moon.

Cochrane hobbled ashore into the platform, having no weight whatever. He
was able to move only by the curious sticky adhesion of his
magnetic-soled slippers to the steel floor-plates beneath him. Or--were
they beneath? There was a crew member walking upside down on a floor
which ought to be a ceiling directly over Cochrane's head. He opened a
door in a side-wall and went in, still upside down. Cochrane felt a
sudden dizziness, at that.

But he went on, using hand-grips. Then he saw Dr. William Holden looking
greenish and ill and trying sickishly to answer questions from West and
Jamison and Bell, who had been plucked from their private lives just as
Cochrane had and were now clamorously demanding of Bill Holden that he
explain what had happened to them.

Cochrane snapped angrily:

"Leave the man alone! He's space-sick! If you get him too much upset
this place will be a mess!"

Holden closed his eyes and said gratefully:

"Shoo them away, Jed, and then come back."

Cochrane waved his hands at them. They went away, stumbling and holding
on to each other in the eerie dream-likeness and nightmarish situation
of no-weight-whatever. There were other passengers from the moon-rocket
in this great central space of the platform. There was a fat woman
looking indignantly at the picture of a weighing-scale painted on the
wall. Somebody had painted it, with a dial-hand pointing to zero pounds.
A sign said, "_Honest weight, no gravity._" There was the stewardess
from the rocket, off duty here. She smoked a cigarette in the blast of
an electric fan. There was a party of moon-tourists giggling foolishly
and clutching at everything and buying souvenirs to mail back to Earth.

"All right, Bill," said Cochrane. "They're gone. Now tell me why all the
not inconsiderable genius in the employ of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and
Fallowe, in my person, has been mobilized and sent up to the moon?"

Bill Holden swallowed. He stood up with his eyes closed, holding onto a
side-rail in the great central room of the platform.

"I have to keep my eyes shut," he explained, queasily. "It makes me ill
to see people walking on side-walls and across ceilings."

A stout tourist was doing exactly that at the moment. If one could walk
anywhere at all with magnetic-soled shoes, one could walk everywhere.
The stout man did walk up the side-wall. He adventured onto the ceiling,
where he was head-down to the balance of his party. He stood there
looking up--down--at them, and he wore a peculiarly astonished and
half-frightened and wholly foolish grin. His wife squealed for him to
come down: that she couldn't bear looking at him so.

"All right," said Cochrane. "You're keeping your eyes closed. But I'm
supposed to take orders from you. What sort of orders are you going to
give?"

"I'm not sure yet," said Holden thinly. "We are sent up here on a
private job for Hopkins--one of your bosses. Hopkins has a daughter.
She's married to a man named Dabney. He's neurotic. He's made a great
scientific discovery and it isn't properly appreciated. So you and I and
your team of tame scientists--we're on our way to the Moon to save his
reason."

"Why save his reason?" asked Cochrane cynically. "If it makes him happy
to be a crackpot--"

"It doesn't," said Holden, with his eyes still closed. He gulped. "Your
job and a large part of my practice depends on keeping him out of a
looney-bin. It amounts to a public-relations job, a production, with me
merely censoring aspects that might be bad for Dabney's psyche.
Otherwise he'll be frustrated."

"Aren't we all?" demanded Cochrane. "Who in hades does he think he is?
Most of us want appreciation, but we have to be glad when we do our work
and get paid for it! We--"

Then he swore bitterly. He had been taken off the job he'd spent years
learning to do acceptably, to phoney a personal satisfaction for the
son-in-law of one of the partners of the firm he worked for. It was
humiliation to be considered merely a lackey who could be ordered to
perform personal services for his boss, without regard to the damage to
the work he was really responsible for. It was even more humiliating to
know he had to do it because he couldn't afford not to.

Babs appeared, obviously gloating over the mere fact that she was
walking in magnetic-soled slippers on the steel decks of the space
platform. Her eyes were very bright. She said:

"Mr. Cochrane, hadn't you better come look at Earth out of the quartz
Earthside windows?"

"Why?" demanded Cochrane bitterly. "If it wasn't that I'd have to hold
onto something with both hands, in order to do it, I'd be kicking
myself. Why should I want to do tourist stuff?"

"So," said Babs, "so later on you can tell when a writer or a scenic
designer tries to put something over on you in a space platform show."

Cochrane grimaced.

"In theory, I should. But do you realize what all this is about? I just
learned!" When Babs shook her head he said sardonically, "We are on the
way to the Moon to stage a private production out of sheer cruelty.
We're hired to rob a happy man of the luxury of feeling sorry for
himself. We're under Holden's orders to cure a man of being a crackpot!"

Babs hardly listened. She was too much filled with the zest of being
where she'd never dared hope to be able to go.

"I wouldn't want to be cured of being a crackpot," protested Cochrane,
"if only I could afford such a luxury! I'd--"

Babs said urgently:

"You'll have to hurry, really! They told me it starts in ten minutes, so
I came to find you right away."

"What starts?"

"We're in eclipse now," explained Babs, starry-eyed. "We're in the
Earth's shadow. In about five minutes we'll be coming out into sunlight
again, and we'll see the new Earth!"

"Guarantee that it will be a new Earth," Cochrane said morosely, "and
I'll come. I didn't do too well on the old one."

But he followed her in all the embarrassment of walking on
magnetic-soled shoes in a total absence of effective gravity. It was
quite a job simply to start off. Without precaution, if he merely tried
to march away from where he was, his feet would walk out from under him
and he'd be left lying on his back in mid-air. Again, to stop without
putting one foot out ahead for a prop would mean that after his feet
paused, his body would continue onward and he would achieve a
full-length face-down flop. And besides, one could not walk with a
regular up-and-down motion, or in seconds he would find his feet
churning emptiness in complete futility.

Cochrane tried to walk, and then irritably took a hand-rail and hauled
himself along it, with his legs trailing behind him like the tail of a
swimming mermaid. He thought of the simile and was not impressed by his
own dignity.

Presently Babs halted herself in what was plainly a metal blister in the
outer skin of the platform. There was a round quartz window, showing the
inside of steel-plate windows beyond it. Babs pushed a button marked
"_Shutter_," and the valves of steel drew back.

Cochrane blinked, lifted even out of his irritableness by the sight
before him.

He saw the immensity of the heavens, studded with innumerable stars.
Some were brighter than others, and they were of every imaginable color.
Tiny glintings of lurid tint--through the Earth's atmosphere they would
blend into an indefinite faint luminosity--appeared so close together
that there seemed no possible interval. However tiny the appearance of a
gap, one had but to look at it for an instant to perceive infinitesimal
flecks of colored fire there, also.

Each tiniest glimmering was a sun. But that was not what made Cochrane
catch his breath.

There was a monstrous space of nothingness immediately before his eyes.
It was round and vast and near. It was black with the utter blackness of
the Pit. It was Earth, seen from its eight-thousand-mile-wide shadow,
unlighted even by the Moon. There was no faintest relief from its
absolute darkness. It was as if, in the midst of the splendor of the
heavens, there was a chasm through which one glimpsed the unthinkable
nothing from which creation was called in the beginning. Until one
realized that this was simply the dark side of Earth, the spectacle was
one of hair-raising horror.

After a moment Cochrane said with a carefully steadied voice:

"My most disparaging opinions of Earth were never as black as this!"

"Wait," said Babs confidently.

Cochrane waited. He had to hold carefully in his mind that this visible
abyss, this enormity of purest dark, was not an opening into nothingness
but was simply Earth at night as seen from space.

Then he saw a faint, faint arch of color forming at its edge. It spread
swiftly. Immediately, it seemed, there was a pinkish glowing line among
the multitudinous stars. It was red. It was very, very bright. It became
a complete half-circle. It was the light of the sun refracted around the
edge of the world.

Within minutes--it seemed in seconds--the line of light was a glory
among the stars. And then, very swiftly, the blazing orb which was the
sun appeared from behind Earth. It was intolerably bright, but it did
not brighten the firmament. It swam among all the myriads of myriads of
suns, burning luridly and in a terrible silence, with visibly writhing
prominences rising from the edge of its disk. Cochrane squinted at it
with light-dazzled eyes.

Then Babs cried softly:

"Beautiful! Oh, beautiful!"

And Cochrane shielded his eyes and saw the world new-born before him.
The arc of light became an arch and then a crescent, and swelled even as
he looked. Dawn flowed below the space platform, and it seemed that seas
and continents and clouds and beauty poured over the disk of darkness
before him.

He stood here, staring, until the steel shutters slowly closed. Babs
said in regret:

"You have to keep your hand on the button to keep the shutters open.
Else the window might get pitted with dust."

Cochrane said cynically:

"And how much good will it have done me to see that, Babs? How can that
be faked in a studio--and how much would a television screen show of
it?"

He turned away. Then he added sourly:

"You stay and look if you like, Babs. I've already had my vanity smashed
to little bits. If I look at that again I'll want to weep in pure
frustration because I can't do anything even faintly as well worth
watching. I prefer to cut down my notions of the cosmos to a tolerable
size. But you go ahead and look!"

He went back to Holden. Holden was painfully dragging himself back into
the rocket-ship. Cochrane went with him. They returned, weightless, to
the admirably designed contour-chairs in which they had traveled to this
place, and in which they would travel farther. Cochrane settled down to
stare numbly at the wall above him. He had been humiliated enough by the
actions of one of the heads of an advertising agency. He found himself
resenting, even as he experienced, the humbling which had been imposed
upon him by the cosmos itself.

Presently the other passengers returned, and the moonship was maneuvered
out of the lock and to emptiness again, and again presently rockets
roared and there was further feeling of intolerable weight. But it was
not as bad as the take-off from Earth.

There followed some ninety-six hours of pure tedium. After the first
accelerating blasts, the rockets were silent. There was no weight.
There was nothing to hear except the droning murmur of unresting
electric fans, stirring the air ceaselessly so that excess moisture from
breathing could be extracted by the dehumidifiers. But for them--if the
air had been left stagnant--the journey would have been insupportable.

There was nothing to see, because ports opening on outer space were not
safe for passengers to look through. Mere humans, untrained to keep
their minds on technical matters, could break down at the spectacle of
the universe. There could be no activity.

Some of the passengers took dozy-pills. Cochrane did not. It was against
the law for dozy-pills to produce a sensation of euphoria, of
well-being. The law considered that pleasure might lead to addiction.
But if a pill merely made a person drowsy, so that he dozed for hours
halfway between sleeping and awake, no harm appeared to be done. Yet
there were plenty of dozy-pill addicts. Many people were not especially
anxious to feel good. They were quite satisfied not to feel anything at
all.

Cochrane couldn't take that way of escape. He lay strapped in his chair
and thought unhappily of many things. He came to feel unclean, as people
used to feel when they traveled for days on end on railroad trains.
There was no possibility of a bath. One could not even change clothes,
because baggage went separately to the moon in a robot freight-rocket,
which was faster and cheaper than a passenger transport, but would kill
anybody who tried to ride it. Fifteen-and twenty-gravity acceleration is
economical of fuel, and six-gravity is not, but nobody can live through
a twenty-gravity lift-off from Earth. So passengers stayed in the
clothes in which they entered the ship, and the only possible concession
to fastidiousness was the disposable underwear one could get and change
to in the rest-rooms.

Babs Deane did not take dozy-pills either, but Cochrane knew better than
to be more than remotely friendly with her outside of office hours. He
did not want to give her any excuse to tell him anything for his own
good. So he spoke pleasantly and kept company only with his own
thoughts. But he did notice that she looked rapt and starry-eyed even
through the long and dreary hours of free flight. She was mentally
tracking the moonship through the void. She'd know when the continents
of Earth were plain to see, and the tints of vegetation on the two
hemispheres--northern and southern--and she'd know when Earth's
ice-caps could be seen, and why.

The stewardess was not too much of a diversion. She was brisk and calm
and soothing, but she became a trifle reluctant to draw too near the
chairs in which her passengers rode. Presently Cochrane made deductions
and maliciously devised a television commercial. In it, a moon-rocket
stewardess, in uniform and looking fresh and charming, would say sweetly
that she went without bathing for days at a time on moon-trips, and did
not offend because she used whoosit's antistinkum. And then he thought
pleasurably of the heads that would roll did such a commercial actually
get on the air.

But he didn't make plans for the production-job he'd been sent to the
moon to do. Psychiatry was specialized, these days, as physical medicine
had been before it. An extremely expensive diagnostician had been sent
to the moon to tap Dabney's reflexes, and he'd gravely diagnosed
frustration and suggested young Dr. Holden for the curative treatment.
Frustration was the typical neurosis of the rich, anyhow, and Bill
Holden had specialized in its cure. His main reliance was on the making
of a dramatic production centering about his patient, which was
expensive enough and effective enough to have made him a quick
reputation. But he couldn't tell Cochrane what was required of him. Not
yet. He knew the disease but not the case. He'd have to see and know
Dabney before he could make use of the extra-special production-crew his
patient's father-in-law had provided from the staff of Kursten, Kasten,
Hopkins and Fallowe.

Ninety-some hours after blast-off from the space platform, the
rocket-ship turned end for end and began to blast to kill its velocity
toward the moon. It began at half-gravity--the red glowing sign gave
warning of it--and rose to one gravity and then to two. After days of
no-weight, two gravities was punishing.

Cochrane thought to look at Babs. She was rapt, lost in picturings of
what must be outside the ship, which she could not see. She'd be
imagining what the television screens had shown often enough, from
film-tapes. The great pock marked face of Luna, with its ring-mountains
in incredible numbers and complexity, and the vast open "seas" which
were solidified oceans of lava, would be clear to her mind's eye. She
would be imagining the gradual changes of the moon's face with nearness,
when the colorings appear. From a distance all the moon seems tan or
sandy in tint. When one comes closer, there are tawny reds and
slate-colors in the mountain-cliffs, and even blues and yellows, and
everywhere there is the ashy, whitish-tan color of the moondust.

Glancing at her, absorbed in her satisfaction, Cochrane suspected that
with only half an excuse she would explain to him how the several
hundreds of degrees difference in the surface-temperature of the moon
between midnight and noon made rocks split and re-split and fracture so
that stuff as fine as talcum powder covered every space not too sharply
tilted for it to rest on.

The feeling of deceleration increased. For part of a second they had the
sensation of three gravities.

Then there was a curious, yielding jar--really very slight--and then the
feeling of excess weight ended altogether. But not the feeling of
weight. They still had weight. It was constant. It was steady. But it
was very slight.

They were on the moon, but Cochrane felt no elation. In the tedious
hours from the space platform he'd thought too much. He was actually
aware of the humiliations and frustrations most men had to conceal from
themselves because they couldn't afford expensive psychiatric
treatments. Frustration was the disease of all humanity, these days. And
there was nothing that could be done about it. Nothing! It simply wasn't
possible to rebel, and rebellion is the process by which humiliation and
frustration is cured. But one could not rebel against the plain fact
that Earth had more people on it than one planet could support.

Merely arriving at the moon did not seem an especially useful
achievement, either to Cochrane or to humanity at large.

Things looked bad.




CHAPTER TWO


Cochrane stood when the stewardess' voice authorized the action. With
sardonic docility he unfastened his safety-belt and stepped out into the
spiral, descending aisle. It seemed strange to have weight again, even
as little as this. Cochrane weighed, on the moon, just one-sixth of what
he would weigh on Earth. Here he would tip a spring-scale at just about
twenty-seven pounds. By flexing his toes, he could jump. Absurdly, he
did. And he rose very slowly, and hovered--feeling singularly
foolish--and descended with a vast deliberation. He landed on the ramp
again feeling absurd indeed. He saw Babs grinning at him.

"I think," said Cochrane, "I'll have to take up toe-dancing."

She laughed. Then there were clankings, and something fastened itself
outside, and after a moment the entrance-door of the moonship opened.

They went down the ramp to board the moon-jeep, holding onto the
hand-rail and helping each other. The tourist giggled foolishly. They
went out the thick doorway and found themselves in an enclosure very
much like the interior of a rather small submarine. But it did have
shielded windows--ports--and Babs instantly pulled herself into a seat
beside one and feasted her eyes. She saw the jagged peaks nearby and the
crenelated ring-mountain wall, miles off to one side, and the smooth
frozen lava of the "sea." Across that dusty surface the horizon was
remarkably near, and Cochrane remembered vaguely that the moon was only
one-fourth the size of Earth, so its horizon would naturally be nearer.
He glanced at the stars that shone even through the glass that denatured
the sunshine. And then he looked for Holden.

The psychiatrist looked puffy and sleepy and haggard and disheveled.
When a person does have space-sickness, even a little weight relieves
the symptoms, but the consequences last for days.

"Don't worry!" he said sourly when he saw Cochrane's eyes upon him. "I
won't waste any time! I'll find my man and get to work at once. Just let
me get back to Earth...."

There were more clankings--the jeep-bus sealing off from the rocket.
Then the vehicle stirred. The landscape outside began to move.

They saw Lunar City as they approached it. It was five giant dust-heaps,
from five hundred-odd feet in height down to three. There were airlocks
at their bases and dust-covered tunnels connecting them, and radar-bowls
about their sides. But they were dust-heaps. Which was completely
reasonable. There is no air on the moon. By day the sun shines down with
absolute ferocity. It heats everything as with a furnace-flame. At night
all heat radiates away to empty space, and the ground-temperature drops
well below that of liquid air. So Lunar City was a group of domes which
were essentially half-balloons--hemispheres of plastic brought from
Earth and inflated and covered with dust. With airlocks to permit
entrance and exit, they were inhabitable. They needed no framework to
support them because there were no stormwinds or earthquakes to put
stresses on them. They needed neither heating nor cooling equipment.
They were buried under forty feet of moon-dust, with vacuum between the
dust-grains. Lunar City was not beautiful, but human beings could live
in it.

The jeep-bus carried them a bare half mile, and they alighted inside a
lock, and another door and another opened and closed, and they emerged
into a scene which no amount of television film-tape could really
portray.

The main dome was a thousand feet across and half as high. There were
green plants growing in tubs and pots. And the air was fresh! It smelled
strange. There could be no vegetation on the rocket and it seemed new
and blissful to breathe really freshened air after days of the canned
variety. But this freshness made Cochrane realize that he'd feel better
for a bath.

He took a shower in his hotel room. The room was very much like one on
Earth, except that it had no windows. But the shower was strange. The
sprays were tiny. Cochrane felt as if he were being sprayed by atomizers
rather than shower-nozzles until he noticed that water ran off him very
slowly and realized that a normal shower would have been overwhelming.
He scooped up a handful of water and let it drop. It took a full second
to fall two and a half feet.

It was unsettling, but fresh clothing from his waiting baggage made him
feel better. He went to the lounge of the hotel, and it was not a
lounge, and the hotel was not a hotel. Everything in the dome was
indoors in the sense that it was under a globular ceiling fifty stories
high. But everything was also out-doors in the sense of bright light and
growing trees and bushes and shrubs.

He found Babs freshly garmented and waiting for him. She said in
businesslike tones:

"Mr. Cochrane, I asked at the desk. Doctor Holden has gone to consult
Mr. Dabney. He asked that we stay within call. I've sent word to Mr.
West and Mr. Jamison and Mr. Bell."

Cochrane approved of her secretarial efficiency.

"Then we'll sit somewhere and wait. Since this isn't an office, we'll
find some refreshment."

They asked for a table and got one near the swimming pool. And Babs wore
her office manner, all crispness and business, until they were seated.
But this swimming pool was not like a pool on Earth. The water was
deeply sunk beneath the pool's rim, and great waves surged back and
forth. The swimmers--.

Babs gasped. A man stood on a board quite thirty feet above the water.
He prepared to dive.

"That's Johnny Simms!" she said, awed.

"Who's he?"

"The playboy," said Babs, staring. "He's a psychopathic personality and
his family has millions. They keep him up here out of trouble. He's
married."

"Too bad--if he has millions," said Cochrane.

"I wouldn't marry a man with a psychopathic personality!" protested
Babs.

"Keep away from people in the advertising business, then," Cochrane told
her.

Johnny Simms did not jounce up and down on the diving board to start. He
simply leaped upward, and went ceilingward for easily fifteen feet, and
hung stationary for a full breath, and then began to descend in literal
slow motion. He fell only two and a half feet the first second, and five
feet more the one after, and twelve and a half after that.... It took
him over four seconds to drop forty-five feet into the water, and the
splash that arose when he struck the surface rose four yards and
subsided with a lunatic deliberation.

Watching, Babs could not keep her businesslike demeanor. She was
bursting with the joyous knowledge that she was on the moon, seeing the
impossible and looking at fame.

They sipped at drinks--but the liquid rose much too swiftly in the
straws--and Cochrane reflected that the drink in Babs' glass would cost
Dabney's father-in-law as much as Babs earned in a week back home, and
his own was costing no less.

Presently a written note came from Holden:

"_Jed: send West and Jamison right away to Dabney's lunar laboratory to
get details of discovery from man named Jones. Get moon-jeep and driver
from hotel. I will want you in an hour.--Bill._"

"I'll be back," said Cochrane. "Wait."

He left the table and found West and Jamison in Bell's room, all three
in conference over a bottle. West and Jamison were Cochrane's scientific
team for the yet unformulated task he was to perform. West was the
popularizing specialist. He could make a television audience believe
that it understood all the seven dimensions required for some branches
of wave-mechanics theory. His explanation did not stick, of course. One
didn't remember them. But they were singularly convincing in cultural
episodes on television productions. Jamison was the prophecy expert. He
could extrapolate anything into anything else, and make you believe that
a one-week drop in the birthdate on Kamchatka was the beginning of a
trend that would leave the Earth depopulated in exactly four hundred and
seventy-three years. They were good men for a television producer to
have on call. Now, instructed, they went out to be briefed by somebody
who undoubtedly knew more than both of them put together, but whom they
would regard with tolerant suspicion.

Bell, left behind, said cagily:

"This script I've got to do, now--Will that laboratory be the set? Where
is it? In the dome?"

"It's not in the dome," Cochrane told him. "West and Jamison took a
moon-jeep to get to it. I don't know what the set will be. I don't know
anything, yet. I'm waiting to be told about the job, myself."

"If I've got to cook up a story-line," observed Bell, "I have to know
the set. Who'll act? You know how amateurs can ham up any script! How
about a part for Babs? Nice kid!"

Cochrane found himself annoyed, without knowing why.

"We just have to wait until we know what our job is," he said curtly,
and turned to go.

Bell said:

"One more thing. If you're planning to use a news cameraman up
here--don't! I used to be a cameraman before I got crazy and started to
write. Let me do the camera-work. I've got a better idea of using a
camera to tell a story now, than--"

"Hold it," said Cochrane. "We're not up here to film-tape a show. Our
job is psychiatry--craziness."

To a self-respecting producer, a psychiatric production would seem
craziness. A script-writer might have trouble writing out a
psychiatrist's prescription, or he might not. But producing it would be
out of all rationality! No camera, the patient would be the star, and
most lines would be ad libbed. Cochrane viewed such a production with
extreme distaste. But of course, if a man wanted only to be famous, it
might be handled as a straight public-relations job. In any case,
though, it would amount to flattery in three dimensions and Cochrane
would rather have no part in it. But he had to arrange the whole thing.

He went back to the table and rejoined Babs. She confided that she'd
been talking to Johnny Simms' wife. She was nice! But homesick. Cochrane
sat down and thought morbid thoughts. Then he realized that he was
irritated because Babs didn't notice. He finished his drink and ordered
another.

Half an hour later, Holden found them. He had in tow a sad-looking
youngish man with a remarkably narrow forehead and an expression of deep
anxiety. Cochrane winced. A neurotic type if there ever was one!

"Jed," said Holden heartily, "here's Mr. Dabney. Mr. Dabney, Jed
Cochrane is here as a specialist in public-relations set-ups. He'll take
charge of this affair. Your father-in-law sent him up here to see that
you are done justice to!"

Dabney seemed to think earnestly before he spoke.

"It is not for myself," he explained in an anxious tone. "It is my work!
That is important! After all, this is a fundamental scientific
discovery! But nobody pays any attention! It is extremely important!
Extremely! Science itself is held back by the lack of attention paid to
my discovery!"

"Which," Holden assured him, "is about to be changed. It's a matter of
public relations. Jed's a specialist. He'll take over."

The sad-faced young man held up his hand for attention. He thought.
Visibly. Then he said worriedly:

"I would take you over to my laboratory, but I promised my wife I would
call her in half an hour from now. Johnny Simms' wife just reminded me.
My wife is back on Earth. So you will have to go to the laboratory
without me and have Mr. Jones show you the proof of my work. A very
intelligent man, Jones--in a subordinate way, of course. Yes. I will get
you a jeep and you can go there at once, and when you come back you can
tell me what you plan. But you understand that it is not for myself that
I want credit! It is my discovery! It is terribly important! It is
vital! It must not be overlooked!"

Holden escorted him away, while Cochrane carefully controlled his
features. After a few moments Holden came back, his face sagging.

"This your drink, Jed?" he asked dispiritedly. "I need it!" He picked up
the glass and emptied it. "The history of that case would be
interesting, if one could really get to the bottom of it! Come along!"
His tone was dreariness itself. "I've got a jeep waiting for us."

Babs stood up, her eyes shining.

"May I come, Mr. Cochrane?"

Cochrane waved her along. Holden tried to stalk gloomily, but nobody can
stalk in one-sixth gravity. He reeled, and then depressedly accommodated
himself to conditions on the moon.

There was an airlock with a smaller edition of the moon-jeep that had
brought them from the ship to the city. It was a brightly-polished metal
body, raised some ten feet off the ground on outrageously large wheels.
It was very similar to the straddle-trucks used in lumberyards on Earth.
It would straddle boulders in its path. It could go anywhere in spite of
dust and detritus, and its metal body was air-tight and held air for
breathing, even out on the moon's surface.

They climbed in. There was the sound of pumping, which grew fainter. The
outer lock-door opened. The moon-jeep rolled outside.

Babs stared with passionate rapture out of a shielded port. There were
impossibly jagged stones, preposterously steep cliffs. There had been no
weather to remove the sharp edge of anything in a hundred million years.
The awkward-seeming vehicle trundled over the lava sea toward the
rampart of mighty mountains towering over Lunar City. It reached a steep
ascent. It climbed. And the way was remarkably rough and the vehicle
springless, but it was nevertheless a cushioned ride. A bump cannot be
harsh in light gravity. The vehicle rode as if on wings.

"All right," said Cochrane. "Tell me the worst. What's the trouble with
him? Is he the result of six generations of keeping the money in the
family? Or is he a freak?"

Holden groaned a little.

"He's practically a stock model of a rich young man without brains
enough for a job in the family firm, and too much money for anything
else. Fortunately for his family, he didn't react like Johnny
Simms--though they're good friends. A hundred years ago, Dabney'd have
gone in for the arts. But it's hard to fool yourself that way now. Fifty
years ago he'd have gone in for left-wing sociology. But we really are
doing the best that can be done with too many people and not enough
world. So he went in for science. It's non-competitive. Incapacity
doesn't show up. But he has stumbled on something. It sounds really
important. It must have been an accident! The only trouble is that it
doesn't mean a thing! Yet because he's accomplished more than he ever
expected to, he's frustrated because it's not appreciated! What a joke!"

Cochrane said cynically:

"You paint a dark picture, Bill. Are you trying to make this thing into
a challenge?"

"You can't make a man famous for discovering something that doesn't
matter," said Holden hopelessly. "And this is that!"

"Nothing's impossible to public relations if you spend enough money,"
Cochrane assured him. "What's this useless triumph of his?"

The jeep bounced over a small cliff and fell gently for half a second
and rolled on. Babs beamed.

"He's found," said Holden discouragedly, "a way to send messages faster
than light. It's a detour around Einstein's stuff--not denying it, but
evading it. Right now it takes not quite two seconds for a message to go
from the moon to Earth. That's at the speed of light. Dabney has
proof--we'll see it--that he can cut that down some ninety-five per
cent. Only it can't be used for Earth-moon communication, because both
ends have to be in a vacuum. It could be used to the space platform,
but--what's the difference? It's a real discovery for which there's no
possible use. There's no place to send messages to!"

Cochrane's eyes grew bright and hard. There were some three thousand
million suns in the immediate locality of Earth--and more only a
relatively short distance way--and it had not mattered to anybody. The
situation did not seem likely to change. But--The moon-jeep climbed and
climbed. It was a mile above the bay of the lava sea and the dust-heaps
that were a city. It looked like ten miles, because of the curve of the
horizon. The mountains all about looked like a madman's dream.

"But he wants appreciation!" said Holden angrily. "People on Earth
almost trampling on each other for lack of room, and people like me
trying to keep them sane when they've every reason for despair--and he
wants appreciation!"

Cochrane grinned. He whistled softly.

"Never underestimate a genius, Bill," he said kindly. "I refer modestly
to myself. In two weeks your patient--I'll guarantee it--will be
acclaimed the hope, the blessing, the greatest man in all the history of
humanity! It'll be phoney, of course, but we'll have Marilyn
Winters--Little Aphrodite herself--making passes at him in hopes of a
publicity break! It's a natural!"

"How'll you do it?" demanded Holden.

The moon-jeep turned in its crazy, bumping progress. A flat area had
been blasted in rock which had been unchanged since the beginning of
time. Here there was a human structure. Typically, it was a dust-heap
leaning against a cliff. There was an airlock and another jeep waited
outside, and there were eccentric metal devices on the flat space,
shielded from direct sunshine and with cables running to them from the
airlock door.

"How?" repeated Cochrane. "I'll get the details here. Let's go! How do
we manage?"

It was a matter, he discovered, of vacuum-suits, and they were tricky to
get into and felt horrible when one was in. Struggling, Cochrane thought
to say:

"You can wait here in the jeep, Babs--"

But she was already climbing into a suit very much oversized for her,
with the look of high excitement that Cochrane had forgotten anybody
could wear.

They got out of a tiny airlock that held just one person at a time. They
started for the laboratory. And suddenly Cochrane saw Babs staring
upward through the dark, almost-opaque glass that a space-suit-helmet
needs in the moon's daytime if its occupant isn't to be fried by
sunlight. Cochrane automatically glanced up too.

He saw Earth. It hung almost in mid-sky. It was huge. It was gigantic.
It was colossal. It was four times the diameter of the moon as seen from
Earth, and it covered sixteen times as much of the sky. Its continents
were plain to see, and its seas, and the ice-caps at its poles gleamed
whitely, and over all of it there was a faintly bluish haze which was
like a glamour; a fey and eerie veiling which made Earth a sight to draw
at one's heart-strings.

Behind it and all about it there was the background of space, so thickly
jeweled with stars that there seemed no room for another tiny gem.

Cochrane looked. He said nothing. Holden stumbled on to the airlock. He
remembered to hold the door open for Babs.

And then there was the interior of the laboratory. It was not wholly
familiar even to Cochrane, who had used sets on the Dikkipatti Hour of
most of the locations in which human dramas can unfold. This was a
physics laboratory, pure and simple. The air smelled of ozone and
spilled acid and oil and food and tobacco-smoke and other items. West
and Jamison were already here, their space-suits removed. They sat
before beer at a table with innumerable diagrams scattered about. There
was a deep-browed man rather impatiently turning to face his new
visitors.

Holden clumsily unfastened the face-plate of his helmet and gloomily
explained his mission. He introduced Cochrane and Babs, verifying in the
process that the dark man was the Jones he had come to see. A physics
laboratory high in the fastnesses of the Lunar Apennines is an odd place
for a psychiatrist to introduce himself on professional business. But
Holden only explained unhappily that Dabney had sent them to learn about
his discovery and arrange for a public-relations job to make it known.

Cochrane saw Jones' expression flicker sarcastically just once during
Holden's explanation. Otherwise he was poker-faced.

"I was explaining the discovery to these two," he observed.

"Shoot it," said Cochrane to West. It was reasonable to ask West for an
explanation, because he would translate everything into televisable
terms.

West said briskly--exactly as if before a television camera--that Mr.
Dabney had started from the well-known fact that the properties of space
are modified by energy fields. Magnetic and gravitational and
electrostatic fields rotate polarized light or bend light or do this or
that as the case may be. But all previous modifications of the constants
of space had been in essentially spherical fields. All previous fields
had extended in all directions, increasing in intensity as the square of
the distance ...

"Cut," said Cochrane.

West automatically abandoned his professional delivery. He placidly
re-addressed himself to his beer.

"How about it, Jones?" asked Cochrane. "Dabney's got a variation? What
is it?"

"It's a field of force that doesn't spread out. You set up two plates
and establish this field between them," said Jones curtly. "It's
circularly polarized and it doesn't expand. It's like a searchlight beam
or a microwave beam, and it stays the same size like a pipe. In that
field--or pipe--radiation travels faster than it does outside. The
properties of space are changed between the plates. Therefore the speed
of all radiation. That's all."

Cochrane meditatively seated himself. He approved of this Jones, whose
eyebrows practically met in the middle of his forehead. He was not more
polite than politeness required. He did not express employer-like
rapture at the mention of his employer's name.

"But what can be done with it?" asked Cochrane practically.

"Nothing," said Jones succinctly. "It changes the properties of space,
but that's all. Can you think of any use for a faster-than-light
radiation-pipe? I can't."

Cochrane cocked an eye at Jamison, who could extrapolate at the drop of
an equation. But Jamison shook his head.

"Communication between planets," he said morosely, "when we get to them.
Chats between sweethearts on Earth and Pluto. Broadcasts to the stars
when we find that another one's set up a similar plate and is ready to
chat with us. There's nothing else."

Cochrane waved his hand. It is good policy to put a specialist in his
place, occasionally.

"Demonstration?" he asked Jones.

"There are plates across the crater out yonder," said Jones without
emotion. "Twenty miles clear reach. I can send a message across and get
it relayed twice and back through two angles in about five per cent of
the time radiation ought to take."

Cochrane said with benign cynicism:

"Jamison, you work by guessing where you can go. Jones works by guessing
where he is. But this is a public relations job. I don't know where we
are or where we can go, but I know where we want to take this thing."

Jones looked at him. Not hostilely, but with the detached interest of a
man accustomed to nearly exact science, when he watches somebody work in
one of the least precise of them all.

Holden said:

"You mean you've worked out some sort of production."

"No production," said Cochrane blandly. "It isn't necessary. A straight
public-relations set-up. We concoct a story and then let it leak out. We
make it so good that even the people who don't believe it can't help
spreading it." He nodded at Jamison. "Right now, Jamison, we want a
theory that the sending of radiation at twenty times the speed of light
means that there is a way to send matter faster than light--as soon as
we work it out. It means that the inertia-mass which increases with
speed--Einstein's stuff--is not a property of matter, but of space, just
as the air-resistance that increases when an airplane goes faster is a
property of air and not of the plane. Maybe we need to work out a theory
that all inertia is a property of space. We'll see if we need that. But
anyhow, just as a plane can go faster in thin air, so matter--any
matter--will move faster in this field as soon as we get the trick of
it. You see?"

Holden shook his head.

"What's that got in it to make Dabney famous?" he asked.

"Jamison will extrapolate from there," Cochrane assured him. "Go ahead,
Jamison. You're on."

Jamison said promptly, with the hypnotic smoothness of the practiced
professional:

"When this development has been completed, not only will messages be
sent at multiples of the speed of light, but matter! Ships! The barrier
to the high destiny of mankind; the limitation of our race to a single
planet of a minor sun--these handicaps crash and will shatter as the
great minds of humanity bend their efforts to make the Dabney
faster-than-light principle the operative principle of our ships. There
are thousands of millions of suns in our galaxy, and not less than one
in three has planets, and among these myriads of unknown worlds there
will be thousands with seas and land and clouds and continents, fit for
men to enter upon, there to rear their cities. There will be starships
roaming distant sun-clusters, and landing on planets in the Milky Way.
We ourselves will see freight-lines to Rigel and Arcturus, and journey
on passenger-liners singing through the void to Andromeda and Aldebaran!
Dabney has made the first breach in the barrier to the illimitable
greatness of humanity!"

Then he stopped and said professionally:

"I can polish that up a bit, of course. All right?"

"Fair," conceded Cochrane. He turned to Holden. "How about a
public-relations job on that order? Won't that sort of publicity meet
the requirements? Will your patient be satisfied with that grade of
appreciation?"

Holden drew a deep breath. He said unsteadily:

"As a neurotic personality, he won't require that it be true. All he'll
want is the seeming. But--Jed, could it be really true? Could it?"

Cochrane laughed unpleasantly. He did not admire himself. His laughter
showed it.

"What do you want?" he demanded. "You got me a job I didn't want. You
shoved it down my throat! Now there's the way to get it done! What more
can you ask?"

Holden winced. Then he said heavily:

"I'd like for it to be true."

Jones moved suddenly. He said in an oddly surprised voice:

"D'you know, it can be! I didn't realize! It can be true! I can make a
ship go faster than light!"

Cochrane said with exquisite irony:

"Thanks, but we don't need it. We aren't getting paid for that! All we
need is a modicum of appreciation for a neurotic son-in-law of a partner
of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe! A public-relations job is all
that's required. You give West the theory, and Jamison will do the
prophecy, and Bell will write it out."

Jones said calmly:

"I will like hell! Look! I discovered this faster-than-light field in
the first place! I sold it to Dabney because he wanted to be famous! I
got my pay and he can keep it! But if he can't understand it himself,
even to lecture about it ... Do you think I'm going to throw in some
extra stuff I noticed, that I can fit into that theory but nobody else
can--Do you think I'm going to give him starships as a bonus?"

Holden said, nodding, with his lips twisted:

"I should have figured that! He bought his great discovery from you, eh?
And that's what he gets frustrated about!"

Cochrane snapped:

"I thought you psychiatrists knew the facts of life, Bill! Dabney's not
unusual in my business! He's almost a typical sponsor!"

"When you ask me to throw away starships," said Jones coldly, "for a
publicity feature, I don't play. I won't take the credit for the field
away from Dabney. I sold him that with my eyes open. But starships are
more important than a fool's hankering to be famous! He'd never try it!
He'd be afraid it wouldn't work! I don't play!"

Holden said stridently:

"I don't give a damn about any deal you made with Dabney! But if you can
get us to the stars--all us humans who need it--you've got to!"

Jones said, again calmly:

"I'm willing. Make me an offer--not cash, but a chance to do something
real--not just a trick for a neurotic's ego!"

Cochrane grinned at him very peculiarly.

"I like your approach. You've got illusions. They're nice things to
have. I wouldn't mind having some myself. Bill," he said to Dr. William
Holden, "how much nerve has Dabney?"

"Speaking unprofessionally," said Holden, "he's a worm with wants. He
hasn't anything but cravings. Why?"

Cochrane grinned again, his head cocked on one side.

"He wouldn't take part in an enterprise to reach the stars, would he?"
When Holden shook his head, Cochrane said zestfully, "I'd guess that the
peak of his ambition would be to have the credit for it if it worked,
but he wouldn't risk being associated with it until it had worked!
Right?"

"Right," said Holden. "I said he was a worm. What're you driving at?"

"I'm outlining what you're twisting my arm to make me do," said
Cochrane, "in case you haven't noticed. Bill, if Jones can really make
a ship go faster than light--"

"I can," repeated Jones. "I simply didn't think of the thing in
connection with travel. I only thought of it for signalling."

"Then," said Cochrane, "I'm literally forced, for Dabney's sake, to do
something that he'd scream shrilly at if he heard about it. We're going
to have a party, Bill! A party after your and my and Jones' hearts!"

"What do you mean?" demanded Holden.

"We make a production after all," said Cochrane, grinning. "We are going
to take Dabney's discovery--the one he bought publicity rights to--very
seriously indeed. I'm going to get him acclaim. First we break a story
of what Dabney's field means for the future of mankind--and then we
prove it! We take a journey to the stars! Want to make your reservations
now?"

"You mean," said West incredulously, "a genuine trip? Why?"

Cochrane snapped at him suddenly.

"Because I can't kid myself any more," he rasped. "I've found out how
little I count in the world and the estimation of Kursten, Kasten,
Hopkins and Fallowe! I've found out I'm only a little man when I thought
I was a big one, and I won't take it! Now I've got an excuse to try to
be a big man! That's reason enough, isn't it?"

Then he glared around the small laboratory under the dust-heap. He was
irritated because he did not feel splendid emotions after making a
resolution and a plan which ought to go down in history--if it worked.
He wasn't uplifted. He wasn't aware of any particular feeling of being
the instrument of destiny or anything else. He simply felt peevish and
annoyed and obstinate about trying the impossible trick.

It annoyed him additionally, perhaps, to see the expression of
starry-eyed admiration on Babs' face as she looked at him across the
untidy laboratory table, cluttered up with beer-cans.




CHAPTER THREE


It is a matter of record that the American continents were discovered
because ice-boxes were unknown in the fifteenth century. There being no
refrigeration, meat did not keep. But meat was not too easy to come by,
so it had to be eaten, even when it stank. Therefore it was a noble
enterprise, and to the glory of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, to
put up the financial backing for even a crackpot who might get spices
cheaper and thereby make the consumption of slightly spoiled meat less
unpleasant. Which was why Columbus got three ships and crews of
jailbirds for them from a government still busy trying to drive the
Moors out of the last corner of Spain.

This was a precedent for the matter on hand now. Cochrane happened to
know the details about Columbus because he'd checked over the research
when he did a show on the Dikkipatti Hour dealing with him. There were
more precedents. The elaborate bargain by which Columbus was to be made
hereditary High Admiral of the Western Oceans, with a bite of all
revenue obtained by the passage he was to discover--he had to hold out
for such terms to make the package he was selling look attractive.
Nobody buys anything that is underpriced too much. It looks phoney. So
Cochrane made his preliminaries rather more impressive than they need
have been from a strictly practical point of view, in order to make the
enterprise practical from a financial aspect.

There was another precedent he did not intend to follow. Columbus did
not know where he was going when he set sail, he did not know where he
was when he arrived at the end of his voyage, and he didn't know where
he'd been when he got back. Cochrane expected to improve on the
achievement of the earlier explorer's doings in these respects.

He commandeered the legal department of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins, and
Fallowe to set up the enterprise with strict legality and discretion.
There came into being a corporation called "Spaceways, Inc." which could
not possibly be considered phoney from any inspection of its charter.
Expert legal advice arranged that its actual stock-holders should appear
to be untraceable. Deft manipulation contrived that though its stock was
legally vested in Cochrane and Holden and Jones--Cochrane negligently
threw in Jones as a convenient name to use--and they were officially the
owners of nearly all the stock, nobody who checked up would believe they
were anything but dummies. Stockholdings in West's, and Jamison's and
Bell's names would look like smaller holdings held for other than the
main entrepreneurs. But these stock-holders were not only the legal
owners of record--they were the true owners. Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins
and Fallowe wanted no actual part of Spaceways. They considered the
enterprise merely a psychiatric treatment for a neurotic son-in-law.
Which, of course, it was. So Spaceways, Inc., quite honestly and validly
belonged to the people who would cure Dabney of his frustration--and
nobody at all believed that it would ever do anything else. Not anybody
but those six owners, anyhow. And as it turned out, not all of them.

The psychiatric treatment began with an innocent-seeming news-item from
Lunar City saying that Dabney, the so-and-so scientist, had consented to
act as consulting physicist to Spaceways, Inc., for the practical
application of his recent discovery of a way to send messages faster
than light.

This was news simply because it came from the moon. It got fairly wide
distribution, but no emphasis.

Then the publicity campaign broke. On orders from Cochrane, Jamison the
extrapolating genius got slightly plastered, in company with the two
news-association reporters in Lunar City. He confided that Spaceways,
Inc., had been organized and was backed to develop the Dabney
faster-than-light-signalling field into a faster-than-light-travel
field. The news men pumped him of all his extrapolations. Cynically,
they checked to see who might be preparing to unload stock. They found
no preparations for stock-sales. No registration of the company for
raising funds. It wasn't going to the public for money. It wasn't
selling anybody anything. Then Cochrane refused to see any reporters at
all, everybody connected with the enterprise shut up tighter than a
clam, and Jamison vanished into a hotel room where he was kept occupied
with beverages and food at Dabney's father-in-law's expense. None of
this was standard for a phoney promotion deal.

The news story exploded. Let loose on an overcrowded planet which had
lost all hope of relief after fifty years in which only the moon had
been colonized--and its colony had a population in the hundreds,
only--the idea of faster-than-light travel was the one impossible dream
that everybody wanted to believe in. The story spread in a manner that
could only be described as chain-reaction in character. And of course
Dabney--as the scientist responsible for the new hope--became known to
all peoples.

The experts of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe checked on the
publicity given to Dabney. Strict advertising agency accounting figured
that to date the cost-per-customer-mention of Dabney and his discovery
were the lowest in the history of advertising. Surveys disclosed that
within three Earth-days less than 3.5 of every hundred interviews
questioned were completely ignorant of Dabney and the prospect of travel
to the stars through his discovery. More people knew Dabney's name than
knew the name of the President of the United States!

That was only the beginning. The leading popular-science show jumped
eight points in audience-rating. It actually reached top-twenty rating
when it assigned a regular five-minute period to the Dabney Field and
its possibilities in human terms. On the sixth day after Jamison's
calculated indiscretion, the public consciousness was literally
saturated with the idea of faster-than-light transportation. Dabney was
mentioned in every interview of every stuffed shirt, he was referred
to on every comedy show (three separate jokes had been invented, which
were developed into one thousand eight hundred switcheroos, most
of them only imperceptibly different from the original trio) and
even Marilyn Winters--Little Aphrodite Herself--was demanding a
faster-than-light-travel sequence in her next television show.

On the seventh day Bill Holden came into the office where Cochrane
worked feverishly.

"Doctor Cochrane," said Holden, "a word with you!"

"Doctor?" asked Cochrane.

"Doctor!" repeated Holden. "I've just been interviewing my patient.
You're good. My patient is adjusted."

Cochrane raised his eyebrows.

"He's famous," said Holden grimly. "He now considers that everybody in
the world knows that he is a great scientist. He is appreciated. He is
happily making plans to go back to Earth and address a few learned
societies and let people admire him. He can now spend the rest of his
life being the man who discovered the principle by which
faster-than-light-travel will some day be achieved. Even when the furor
dies down, he will have been a great man--and he will stay a great man
in his own estimation. In short, he's cured."

Cochrane grinned.

"Then I'm fired?"

"We are," said Holden. "There are professional ethics even among
psychiatrists, Jed. I have to admit that the guy now has a permanent
adjustment to reality. He has been recognized as a great scientist. He
is no longer frustrated."

Cochrane leaned back in his chair.

"That may be good medical ethics," he observed, "but it's lousy business
practice, Bill. You say he's adjusted to reality. That means that he
will now have a socially acceptable reaction to anything that's likely
to happen to him."

Holden nodded.

"A well-adjusted person does. Dabney's the same person. He's the same
fool. But he'll get along all right. A psychiatrist can't change a
personality! All he can do is make it adjust to the world about so the
guy doesn't have to be tucked away in a straight-jacket. In that sense,
Dabney is adjusted."

"You've played a dirty trick on him," said Cochrane. "You've stabilized
him, and that's the rottenest trick anybody can play on anybody! You've
put him into a sort of moral deep-freeze. It's a dirty trick, Bill!"

"Look who's talking!" said Holden wearily. "I suppose the advertising
business is altruistic and unmercenary?"

"The devil, no!" said Cochrane indignantly. "We serve a useful purpose!
We tell people that they smell bad, and so give them an alibi for the
unpopularity their stupidity has produced. But then we tell them to use
so-and-so's breath sweetener or whosit's non-immunizing deodorant
they'll immediately become the life of every party they attend! It's a
lie, of course, but it's a dynamic lie! It gives the frustrated
individual something to do! It sells him hope and therefore
activity--and inactivity is a sort of death!"

Holden looked at Cochrane with a dreary disinterest.

"You're adjusted, Jed! But do you really believe that stuff?"

Cochrane grinned again.

"Only on Tuesdays and Fridays. It's about two-sevenths true. But it does
have that much truth in it! Nobody ever gets anything done while they
merely make socially acceptable responses to the things that happen to
them! Take Dabney himself! We've got a hell of a thing coming along now
just because he wouldn't make the socially acceptable response to having
a rich wife and no brains. He rebelled. So mankind will start moving to
the stars!"

"You still believe it?"

Cochrane grimaced.

"Yesterday morning I sweated blood in a space-suit out in the crater
beyond Jones' laboratory. He tried his trick. He had a small
signal-rocket mounted on the far side of that crater,--twenty-some
miles. It was in front of the field-plate that established the Dabney
field across the crater to another plate near us. Jones turned on the
field. He ignited the rocket by remote control. I was watching with a
telescope. I gave him the word to fire.... How long do you think it took
that rocket to cross the crater in that field that works like a pipe? It
smashed into the plate at the lab!"

Holden shook his head.

"It took slightly," said Cochrane, "slightly under three-fifths of a
second."

Holden blinked. Cochrane said:

"A signal-rocket has an acceleration of about six hundred feet per
second, level flight, no gravity component, mass acceleration only. It
should have taken a hundred seconds plus to cross that crater--over
twenty miles. It shouldn't have stayed on course. It did stay on course,
inside the field. It did take under three-fifths of a second. The gadget
works!"

Holden drew a deep breath.

"So now you need more money and you want me not to discharge my patient
as cured."

"Not a bit of it!" snapped Cochrane. "I don't want him as a patient! I'm
only willing to accept him as a customer! But if he wants fame, I'll
sell it to him. Not as something to lean his fragile psyche on, but
something to wallow in! Do you think he could ever get too famous for
his own satisfaction?"

"Of course not," said Holden. "He's the same fool."

"Then we're in business," Cochrane told him. "Not that I couldn't peddle
my fish elsewhere. I'm going to! But I'll give him old-customer
preference. I'll want him out at the distress-torp tests this afternoon.
They'll be public."

"This afternoon?" asked Holden. "Distress-torp?"

A lunar day is two Earth-weeks-long. A lunar night is equally
long-drawn-out. Cochrane said impatiently:

"I got out of bed four hours ago. To me that's morning. I'll eat lunch
in an hour. That's noon. Say, three hours from now, whatever o'clock it
is lunar time."

Holden glanced at his watch and made computations. He said:

"That'll be half-past two hundred and three o'clock, if you're curious.
But what's a distress-torp?"

"Shoo!" said Cochrane. "I'll send Babs to find you and load you on the
jeep. You'll see then. Now I'm busy!"

Holden shrugged and went away, and Cochrane stared at his own watch.
Since a lunar day and night together fill twenty-eight Earth days of
time, a strictly lunar "day" contains nearly three hundred forty
Earth-hours. To call one-twelfth of that period an hour would be an
affectation. To call each twenty-four Earth hours a day would have been
absurd. So the actual period of the moon's rotation was divided into
familiar time-intervals, and a bulletin-board in the hotel lobby in
Lunar City notified those interested that: "_Sunday will be from 143
o'clock to 167 o'clock A.M._" There would be another Sunday some time
during the lunar afternoon.

Cochrane debated momentarily whether this information could be used in
the publicity campaign of Spaceways, Inc. Strictly speaking, there was
some slight obligation to throw extra fame Dabney's way regardless,
because the corporation had been formed as a public-relations device.
Any other features, such as changing the history of the human race, were
technically incidental. But Cochrane put his watch away. To talk about
horology on the moon wouldn't add to Dabney's stature as a phoney
scientist. It didn't matter.

He went back to the business at hand. Some two years before there had
been a fake corporation organized strictly for the benefit of its
promoters. It had built a rocket-ship ostensibly for the establishment
of a colony on Mars. The ship had managed to stagger up to Luna, but no
farther. Its promoters had sold stock on the promise that a ship that
could barely reach Luna could take off from that small globe with six
times as much fuel as it could lift off of Earth. Which was true.
Investors put in their money on that verifiable fact. But the truth
happened to be, of course, that it would still take an impossible amount
of fuel to accelerate the ship--so heavily loaded--to a speed where it
would reach Mars in one human lifetime. Taking off from Luna would solve
only the problem of gravity. It wouldn't do a thing about inertia. So
the ship never rose from its landing near Lunar City. The corporation
that had built it went profitably bankrupt.

Cochrane had been working feverishly to find out who owned that ship
now. Just before the torp-test he'd mentioned, he found that the ship
belonged to the hotel desk-clerk, who had bought it in hope of renting
it sooner or later for television background-shots in case anybody was
crazy enough to make a television film-tape on the moon. He was now
discouraged. Cochrane chartered it, putting up a bond to return it
undamaged. If the ship was lost, the hotel-clerk would get back his
investment--about a week's pay.

So Cochrane had a space-ship practically in his pocket when the public
demonstration of the Dabney field came off at half-past 203 o'clock.

The site of the demonstration was the shadowed, pitch-dark part of the
floor of a crater twenty miles across, with walls some ten thousand
jagged feet high. The furnace-like sunshine made the plain beyond the
shadow into a sea of blinding brightness. The sunlit parts of the
crater's walls were no less terribly glaring. But above the edge of the
cliffs the stars began; infinitely small and many-colored, with
innumerable degrees of brightness. The Earth hung in mid-sky like a
swollen green apple, monstrous in size. And the figures which moved
about the scene of the test could be seen only faintly by reflected
light from the lava plain, because one's eyes had to be adjusted to the
white-hot moon-dust on the plain and mountains.

There were not many persons present. Three jeeps waited in the
semi-darkness, out of the burning sunshine. There were no more than a
dozen moon-suited individuals to watch and to perform the test of the
Dabney field. Cochrane had scrupulously edited all fore-news of the
experiment to give Dabney the credit he had paid for. There were
present, then, the party from Earth--Cochrane and Babs and Holden, with
the two tame scientists and Bell the writer--and the only two reporters
on the moon. Only news syndicates could stand the expense-account of a
field man in Lunar City. And then there were Jones and Dabney and two
other figures apparently brought by Dabney.

There was, of course, no sound at all on the moon itself. There was no
air to carry it. But from each plastic helmet a six-inch antenna
projected straight upward, and the microwaves of suit-talkies made a
jumble of slightly metallic sounds in the headphones of each suit.

As soon as Cochrane got out of the jeep's air-lock and was recognized,
Dabney said agitatedly:

"Mr. Cochrane! Mr. Cochrane! I have to discuss something with you! It is
of the utmost importance! Will you come into the laboratory?"

Cochrane helped Babs to the ground and made his way to the airlock in
the dust-heap against the cliff. He went in, with two other space-suited
figures who detached themselves from the rest to follow him. Once inside
the odorous, cramped laboratory, Dabney opened his face-plate and began
to speak before Cochrane was ready to hear him. His companion beamed
amiably.

"--and therefore, Mr. Cochrane," Dabney was saying agitatedly, "I insist
that measures be taken to protect my scientific reputation! If this test
should fail, it will militate against the acceptance of my discovery! I
warn you--and I have my friend Mr. Simms here as witness--that I will
not be responsible for the operation of apparatus made by a subordinate
who does not fully comprehend the theory of my discovery! I will not be
involved--"

Cochrane nodded. Dabney, of course, didn't understand the theory of the
field he'd bought fame-rights to. But there was no point in bringing
that up. Johnny Simms beamed at both of them. He was the swimmer Babs
had pointed out in the swimming-pool. His face was completely unlined
and placid, like the face of a college undergraduate. He had never
worried about anything. He'd never had a care in the world. He merely
listened with placid interest.

"I take it," said Cochrane, "that you don't mind the test being made, so
long as you don't have to accept responsibility for its failure--and so
long as you get the credit for its success if it works. That's right,
isn't it?"

"If it fails, I am not responsible!" insisted Dabney stridently. "If it
succeeds, it will be because of my discovery."

Cochrane sighed a little. This was a shabby business, but Dabney would
have convinced himself, by now, that he was the genius he wanted people
to believe him.

"Before the test," said Cochrane gently, "you make a speech. It will be
recorded. You disclaim the crass and vulgar mechanical details and
emphasize that you are like Einstein, dealing in theoretic physics only.
That you are naturally interested in attempts to use your discovery, but
your presence is a sign of your interest but not your responsibility."

"I shall have to think it over--," began Dabney nervously.

"You can say," promised Cochrane, "that if it does not work you will
check over what Jones did and tell him why."

"Y-yes," said Dabney hesitantly, "I could do that. But I must think it
over first. You will have to delay--"

"If I were you," said Cochrane confidentially, "I would plan a speech to
that effect because the test is coming off in five minutes."

He closed his face-plate as Dabney began to protest. He went into the
lock. He knew better than to hold anything up while waiting for a
neurotic to make a decision. Dabney had all he wanted, now. From this
moment on he would be frantic for fear of losing it. But there could be
no argument outside the laboratory. In the airlessness, anything anybody
said by walkie-talkie could be heard by everybody.

When Dabney and Simms followed out of the lock, Cochrane was helping
Jones set up the device that had been prepared for this test. It was
really two devices. One was a very flat cone, much like a coolie-hat and
hardly larger, with a sort of power-pack of coils and batteries
attached. The other was a space-ship's distress-signal rocket, designed
to make a twenty-mile streak of red flame in emptiness. Nobody had yet
figured out what good a distress signal would do, between Earth and
moon, but the idea was soothing. The rocket was four feet long and six
inches in diameter. At its nose there was a second coolie-hat cone, with
other coils and batteries.

Jones set the separate cone on the ground and packed stones around and
under it to brace it. His movements were almost ridiculously deliberate.
Bending over, he bent slowly, or the motion would lift his feet off the
ground. Straightening up, he straightened slowly, or the upward impetus
of his trunk would again lift him beyond contact with solidity. But he
braced the flat cone carefully.

He set the signal-torpedo over that cone. The entire set-up was under
six feet tall, and the coolie-hat cones were no more than eighteen
inches in diameter. He said flatly:

"I'm all ready."

The hand and arm of a space-suited figure lifted, for attention.
Dabney's voice came worriedly from the headphones of every suit:

"I wish it understood," he said in some agitation, "that this first
attempted application of my discovery is made with my consent, but that
I am not aware of the mechanical details. As a scientist, my work has
been in pure science. I have worked for the advancement of human
knowledge, but the technological applications of my discovery are not
mine. Still--if this device does not work, I will take time from my more
important researches to inquire into what part of my discovery has been
inadequately understood and applied. It may be that present technology
is not qualified to apply my discovery--"

Jones said without emotion--but Cochrane could imagine his poker-faced
expression inside his helmet:

"That's right. I consulted Mr. Dabney about the principles, but the
apparatus is my doing, I take the responsibility for that!"

Then Cochrane added with pleasant irony:

"Since all this is recorded, Mr. Dabney can enlarge upon his disinterest
later. Right now, we can go ahead. Mr. Dabney disavows us unless we are
successful. Let us let it go at that." Then he said: "The observatory's
set to track?"

A muffled voice said boredly, by short-wave from the observatory up on
the crater's rim:

"_We're ready. Visual and records, and we've got the timers set to clock
the auto-beacon signals as they come in._"

The voice was not enthusiastic. Cochrane had had to put up his own money
to have the nearside lunar observatory put a low-power telescope to
watch the rocket's flight. In theory, this distress-rocket should make a
twenty-mile streak of relatively long-burning red sparks. A tiny
auto-beacon in its nose was set to send microwave signals at ten-second
intervals. On the face of it, it had looked like a rather futile
performance.

"Let's go," said Cochrane.

He noted with surprise that his mouth was suddenly dry. This affair was
out of all reason. A producer of television shows should not be the
person to discover in an abstruse scientific development the way to
reach the stars. A neurotic son-in-law of an advertising tycoon should
not be the instrument by which the discovery should come about. A
psychiatrist should not be the means of associating Jones--a very junior
physicist with no money--and Cochrane and the things Cochrane was
prepared to bring about if only this unlikely-looking gadget worked.

"Jones," said Cochrane with a little difficulty, "let's follow an
ancient tradition. Let Babs christen the enterprise by throwing the
switch."

Jones pointed there in the shadow of the crater-wall, and Babs moved to
the switch he indicated. She said absorbedly:

"Five, four, three, two, one--"

She threw the switch. There was a spout of lurid red flame.

The rocket vanished.

It vanished. It did not rise, visibly. It simply went away from where it
was, with all the abruptness of a light going out. There was a flurry of
the most brilliant imaginable carmine flame. That light remained. But
the rocket did not so much rise as disappear.

Cochrane jerked his head up. He was close to the line of the rocket's
ascent. He could see a trail of red sparks which stretched to
invisibility. It was an extraordinarily thin line. The separate flecks
of crimson light which comprised it were distant in space. They were so
far from each other that the signal-rocket was a complete failure as a
device making a streak of light that should be visible.

The muffled voice in the helmet-phones said blankly:

"_Hey! What'd you do to that rocket?_"

The others did not move. They seemed stunned. The vanishing of the
rocket was no way for a rocket to act. In all expectation, it should
have soared skyward with a reasonable velocity, and should have
accelerated rather more swiftly from the moon's surface than it would
have done from Earth. But it should have remained visible during all its
flight. Its trail should have been a thick red line. Instead, the red
sparks were so far separated--the trail was so attenuated that it was
visible only from a spot near its base. The observatory voice said more
blankly still:

"_Hey! I've picked up the trail! I can't see it nearby, but it seems to
start, thin, about fifty miles up and go on away from there! That
rocket shouldn't ha' gone more than twenty miles! What happened?_"

"_Watch for the microwave signals_," said Jones' voice in Cochrane's
headphones.

The voice from the observatory squeaked suddenly. This was not one of
the highly-placed astronomers, but part of the mechanical staff who'd
been willing to do an unreasonable chore for pay.

"_Here's the blip! It's crazy! Nothing can go that fast!_"

And then in the phones there came the relayed signal of the auto-beacon
in the vanished rocket. The signal-sound was that of a radar pulse,
beginning at low pitch and rising three octaves in the tenth of a
second. At middle C--the middle of the range of a piano--there was a
momentary spurt of extra volume. But in the relayed signal that louder
instant had dropped four tones. Cochrane said crisply:

"Jones, what speed would that be?"

"_It'd take a slide-rule to figure it_," said Jones' voice, very calmly,
"_but it's faster than anything ever went before._"

Cochrane waited for the next beep. It did not come in ten seconds. It
was easily fifteen. Even he could figure out what that meant! A
signal-source that stretched ten seconds of interval at source to
fifteen at reception ...

The voice from the observatory wailed:

"_It's crazy! It can't be going like that!_"

They waited. Fifteen seconds more. Sixteen. Eighteen. Twenty. The beep
sounded. The spurt of sound had dropped a full octave. The
signal-rocket, traveling normally, might have attained a maximum
velocity of some two thousand feet per second. It was now moving at a
speed which was an appreciably large fraction of the speed of light.
Which was starkly impossible. It simply happened to be true.

They heard the signal once more. The observatory's multiple-receptor
receiver had been stepped up to maximum amplification. The signal was
distinct, but very faint indeed. And the rocket was then traveling--so
it was later computed--at seven-eighths of the speed of light. Between
the flat cone on the front of the distress-torpedo, and the flat cone on
the ground, a field of force existed. The field was not on the back
surface of the torpedo's cone, but before the front surface. It went
back to the moon from there, so all the torpedo and its batteries were
in the columnar stressed space. And an amount of rocket-push that should
have sent the four-foot torpedo maybe twenty miles during its period of
burning, had actually extended its flight to more than thirty-seven
hundred miles before the red sparks were too far separated to be traced
any farther, and by then had kicked the torpedo up impossibly close to
light-speed.

In a sense, the Dabney field had an effect similar to the invention of
railways. The same horsepower moved vastly more weight faster, over
steel rails, than it could haul over a rutted dirt road. The same
rocket-thrust moved more weight faster in the Dabney field than in
normal space. There would be a practical limit to the speed at which a
wagon could be drawn over a rough road. The speed of light was a limit
to the speed of matter in normal space. But on a railway the practical
speed at which a vehicle could travel went up from three miles an hour
to a hundred and twenty. In the Dabney field it was yet to be discovered
what the limiting velocity might be. But old formulas for acceleration
and increase-of-mass-with-velocity simply did not apply in a Dabney
field.

Jones rode back to Lunar City with Cochrane and Holden and Babs. His
face was dead-pan.

Babs tried to recover the mien and manner of the perfect secretary.

"Mr. Cochrane," she said professionally, "will you want to read the
publicity releases Mr. Bell turns out from what Mr. West and Mr. Jamison
tell him?"

"I don't think it matters," said Cochrane. "The newsmen will pump West
and Jamison empty, anyhow. It's all right. In fact, it's better than our
own releases would be. They'll contradict each other. It'll sound more
authentic that way. We're building up a customer-demand for
information."

The small moon-jeep rolled and bumped gently down the long, improbable
highway back to Lunar City. Its engine ran smoothly, as steam-engines
always do. It ran on seventy per cent hydrogen peroxide, first developed
as a fuel back in the 1940s for the pumps of the V2 rockets that tried
to win the Second World War for Germany. When hydrogen peroxide comes in
contact with a catalyst, such as permanganate of potash, it breaks down
into oxygen and water. But the water is in the form of high-pressure
steam, which is used in engines. The jeep's fuel supplied steam for
power and its ashes were water to drink and oxygen to breathe. Steam ran
all motorized vehicles on Luna.

"What are you thinking about, Jones?" asked Cochrane suddenly.

Jones said meditatively:

"I'm wondering what sort of field-strength a capacity-storage system
would give me. I boosted the field intensity this time. The results were
pretty good. I'm thinking--suppose I made the field with a strobe-light
power-pack--or maybe a spot-welding unit. Even a portable strobe-light
gives a couple of million watts for the forty-thousandth of a second.
Suppose I fixed up a storage-pack to give me a field with a few billion
watts in it? It might be practically like matter-transmission, though it
would really be only high-speed travel. I think I've got to work on that
idea a little ..."

Cochrane digested the information in silence.

"Far be it from me," he said presently, "to discourage such high-level
contemplation. Bill, what's on your mind?"

Holden said moodily:

"I'm convinced that the thing works. But Jed! You talk as if you hadn't
any more worries! Yet even if you and Jones do have a way to make a ship
travel faster than light, you haven't got a ship or the capital you
need--."

"I've got scenery that looks like a ship," said Cochrane mildly.
"Consider that part settled."

"But there are supplies. Air--water--food--a crew--. We can't pay for
such things! Here on the moon the cost of everything is preposterous!
How can you try out this idea without more capital than you can possibly
raise?"

"I'm going to imitate my old friend Christopher Columbus," said
Cochrane. "I'm going to give the customers what they want. Columbus
didn't try to sell anybody shares in new continents. Who wanted new
continents? Who wanted to move to a new world? Who wants new planets
now? Everybody would like to see their neighbors move away and leave
more room, but nobody wants to move himself. Columbus sold a promise of
something that had an already-established value, that could be sold in
every town and village--that had a merchandising system already set up!
I'm going to offer just such a marketable commodity. I'll have
freight-rockets on the way up here within twenty-four hours, and the
freight and their contents will all be paid for!"

He turned to Babs. He looked more sardonic and cynical than ever before.

"Babs, you've just witnessed one of the moments that ought to be
illustrated in all the grammar-school history-books along with Ben
Franklin flying a kite. What's topmost in your mind?"

She hesitated and then flushed. The moon-jeep crunched and clanked
loudly over the trail that led downhill. There was no sound outside, of
course. There was no air. But the noise inside the moon-vehicle was
notable. The steam-motor, in particular, made a highly individual
racket.

"I'd--rather not say," said Babs awkwardly. "What's your own main
feeling, Mr. Cochrane?"

"Mine?" Cochrane grinned. "I'm thinking what a hell of a funny world
this is, when people like Dabney and Bill and Jones and I are the ones
who have to begin operation outer space!"




CHAPTER FOUR


Cochrane said kindly into the vision-beam microphone to Earth, "Cancel
section C, paragraph nine. Then section b(1) from paragraph eleven. Then
after you've canceled the entire last section--fourteen--we can sign up
the deal."

There was a four-second pause. About two seconds for his voice to reach
Earth. About two seconds for the beginning of the reply to reach him.
The man at the other end protested wildly.

"We're a long way apart," said Cochrane blandly, "and our talk only
travels at the speed of light. You're not talking from one continent to
another. Save tolls. Yes or no?"

Another four-second pause. The man on Earth profanely agreed. Cochrane
signed the contract before him. The other man signed. Not only the
documents but all conversation was recorded. There were plugged-in
witnesses. The contract was binding.

Cochrane leaned back in his chair. His eyes blinked wearily. He'd spent
hours going over the facsimile-transmitted contract with Joint Networks,
and had weeded out a total of six joker-stipulations. He was very tired.
He yawned.

"You can tell Jones, Babs," he said, "that all the high financing's
done. He can spend money. And you can transmit my resignation to
Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe. And since this is a pretty risky
operation, you'd better send a service message asking what you're to do
with yourself. They'll probably tell you to take the next rocket back
and report to the secretarial pool, I'm afraid. The same fate probably
awaits West and Jamison and Bell."

Babs said guiltily:

"Mr. Cochrane--you've been so busy I had to use my own judgment. I
didn't want to interrupt you--."

"What now?" demanded Cochrane.

"The publicity on the torp-test," said Babs guiltily, "was so good
that the firm was worried for fear we'd seem to be doing it for
a client of the firm--which we are. So we've all been put on a
leave-with-expenses-and-pay status. Officially, we're all sick and the
firm is paying our expenses until we regain our health."

"Kind of them," said Cochrane. "What's the bite?"

"They're sending up talent contracts for us to sign," admitted Babs.
"When we go back, we would command top prices for interviews. The firm,
of course, will want to control that."

Cochrane raised his eyebrows.

"I see! But you'll actually be kept off the air so Dabney can be
television's fair-haired boy. He'll go on Marilyn Winter's show, I'll
bet, because that has the biggest audience on the planet. He'll lecture
Little Aphrodite Herself on the constants of space and she'll flutter
her eyelashes at him and shove her chest-measurements in his direction
and breathe how wonderful it is to be a man of science!"

"How'd you know?" demanded Babs, surprised.

Cochrane winced.

"Heaven help me, Babs, I didn't. I tried to guess at something too
impossible even for the advertising business! But I failed! I failed!
You and my official gang, then, are here with the firm's blessing, free
of all commands and obligations, but drawing salary and expenses?"

"Yes," admitted Babs. "And so are you."

"I get off!" said Cochrane firmly. "Forward my resignation. It's a
matter of pure vanity. But Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe do move
in a mysterious way to latch onto a fast buck! I'm going to get some
sleep. Is there anything else you've had to use your judgment on?"

"The contracts for re-broadcast of the torp-test. The original broadcast
had an audience-rating of seventy-one!"

"Such," said Cochrane, "are the uses of fame. Our cash?"

She showed him a neatly typed statement. For the original run of the
torp-test film-tape, so much. It was to be re-run with a popularization
of the technical details by West, and a lurid extrapolation of things to
come by Jamison. The sponsors who got hold of commercial time with that
expanded and souped-up version would expect, and get, an audience-rating
unparalleled in history. Dabney was to take a bow on the rebroadcast,
too--very much the dignified and aloof scientist. There were other
interviews. Dabney again, from a script written by Bell. And Jones.
Jones hated the idea of being interviewed, but he had faced a
beam-camera and answered idiotic questions, and gone angrily back to his
work.

Spaceways, Inc., had a bank-account already amounting to more than
twenty years of Cochrane's best earning-power. He was selling publicity
for sponsors to hang their commercials on, in a strict parallel to
Christopher Columbus' selling of spices to come. But Cochrane was
delivering for cash. Freight-rockets were on the way moonward now, whose
cargoes of supplies for a space-journey Cochrane was accepting only when
a bonus in money was paid for the right to brag about it. So-and-so's
oxygen paid for the privilege of supplying air-reserves.
What's-his-name's dehydrated vegetables were accepted on similar terms,
with whoosit's instant coffee and somebody else's noodle soup in bags.

"If," said Cochrane tiredly, looking up from the statement, "we could
only start off in a fleet instead of a single ship, Babs, we'd not only
be equipped but so rich before we started that we'd want to stay home to
enjoy it!" He yawned prodigiously. "I'm going to get some sleep. Don't
let me sleep too long!"

He went off to his hotel-room and was out cold before his head had
drifted down to its pillow. But he was not pleased with himself. It
annoyed him that his revolt against being an expendable employee had
taken the form of acting like one of his former bosses in collecting
ruthlessly for the brains--in the case of Jones--and the neurotic
idiosyncrasies--in the case of Dabney--of other men. The gesture by
which he had become independent was not quite the splendid, scornful one
he'd have liked. The fact that this sort of gesture worked, and nothing
else would have, did not make him feel better.

But he slept.

He dreamed that he was back at his normal business of producing a
television show. Nobody but himself cared whether the show went on or
not. The actual purpose of all his subordinates seemed to be to cut as
many throats among their fellow-workers as possible--in a business way,
of course--so that by their own survival they might succeed to a better
job and higher pay. This is what is called the fine spirit of teamwork
by which things get done, both in private and public enterprise.

It was a very realistic dream, but it was not restful.

While he slept, the world wagged on and the cosmos continued on its
normal course. The two moons of Earth--one natural and one
artificial--swung in splendid circles about. A psychiatrist should not
be the means of associ-[Missing text] that planet's divided rings. The
red spot of Jupiter and the bands on that gas-giant world moved in
orderly fashion about its circumference. Light-centuries away, giant
Cepheid suns expanded monstrously and contracted again, rather more
rapidly than their gravitational fields could account for. Double stars
sedately swung about each other. Comets reached their farthest points
and, mere aggregations of frigid jagged stones and metal, prepared for
another plunge back into light and heat and warmth.

And various prosaic actions took place on Luna.

When Cochrane waked and went back to the hotel-room in use as an office,
he found Babs talking confidentially to a woman--girl, rather--whom
Cochrane vaguely remembered. Then he did a double take. He did remember
her. Three or four years before she'd been the outstanding television
personality of the year. She'd been pretty, but not so pretty that you
didn't realize that she was a person. She was everything that Marilyn
Winters was not--and she'd been number two name in television.

Cochrane said blankly:

"Aren't you Alicia Keith?"

The girl smiled faintly. She wasn't as pretty as she had been. She
looked patient. And an expression of patience, on a woman's face, is
certainly not unpleasant. But it isn't glamorous, either.

"I was," she said. "I married Johnny Simms."

Cochrane looked at Babs.

"They live up here," explained Babs. "I pointed him out at the
swimming-pool the day we got here."

"Wonderful," said Cochrane. "How--"

"Johnny," said Alicia, "has bought into your Spaceways corporation. He
got your man West drunk and bought his shares of Spaceway stock."

Cochrane sat down--not hard, because it was impossible to sit down hard
on the moon. But he sat down as hard as it was possible to sit.

"Why'd he do that?"

"He found out you had hold of the old Mars colony ship. He understands
you're going to take a trip out to the stars. He wants to go along. He's
very much like a little boy. He hates it here."

"Then why live--." Cochrane checked the question, not quite in time.

"He can't go back to Earth," said Alicia calmly. "He's a psychopathic
personality. He's sane and quite bright and rather dear in his way, but
he simply can't remember what is right and wrong. Especially when he
gets excited. When they fixed up Lunar City as an international colony,
by sheer oversight they forgot to arrange for extradition from it. So
Johnny can live here. He can't live anywhere else--not for long."

Cochrane said nothing.

"He wants to go with you," said Alicia pleasantly. "He's thrilled. The
lawyer his family keeps up here to watch over him is thrilled, too. He
wants to go back and visit his family. And as a stockholder, Johnny can
keep you from taking a ship or any other corporate property out of the
jurisdiction of the courts. But he'd rather go with you. Of course I
have to go too."

"It's blackmail," said Cochrane without heat. "A pretty neat job of it,
too. Babs, you see Holden about this. He's a psychiatrist." He turned to
Alicia. "Why do you want to go? I don't know whether it'll be dangerous
or not."

"I married Johnny," said Alicia. Her smile was composed. "I thought it
would be wonderful to be able to trust somebody that nobody else could
trust." After a moment she added: "It would be, if one could."

A few moments later she went away, very pleasantly and very calmly. Her
husband had no sense of right or wrong--not in action, anyhow. She tried
to keep him from doing too much damage by exercising the knowledge she
had of what was fair and what was not. Cochrane grimaced and told Babs
to make a note to talk to Holden. But there were other matters on hand,
too. There were waivers to be signed by everybody who went along off
Luna. Then Cochrane said thoughtfully:

"Alicia Keith would be a good name for film-tape ..."

He plunged into the mess of paper-work and haggling which somebody has
to do before any achievement of consequence can come about. Pioneer
efforts, in particular, require the same sort of clearing-away process
as the settling of a frontier farm. Instead of trees to be chopped
and dug up by the roots, there are the gratuitous obstructionists
who have to be chopped off at the ankles in a business way, and
the people who exercise infinite ingenuity trying to get a cut of
something--anything--somebody else is doing. And of course there are
the publicity-hounds. Since Spaceways was being financed on sales of
publicity which could be turned on this product and that,
publicity-hounds cut into its revenue and capital.

Back on Earth a crackpot inventor had a lawyer busily garnering free
advertisement by press conferences about the injury done his client by
Spaceways, Inc., who had stolen his invention to travel through space
faster than light. Somebody in the Senate made a speech accusing the
Spaceway project of being a political move by the party in power for
some dire ultimate purpose.

Ultimately the crackpot inventor would get on the air and announce
triumphantly that only part of his invention had been stolen, because
he'd been too smart to write it down or tell anybody, and he wouldn't
tell anybody--not even a court--the full details of his invention unless
paid twenty-five million in cash down, and royalties afterward. The
project for a congressional investigation of Spaceways would die in
committee.

But there were other griefs. The useless spaceship hulk had to be
emptied of the mining-tools stored in it. This was done by men working
in space-suits. Occupational rules required them to exert not more than
one-fourth of the effort they would have done if working for themselves.
When the ship was empty, air was released in it, and immediately froze
to air-snow. So radiant heaters had to be installed and powered to warm
up the hull to where an atmosphere could exist in it. Its generators had
to be thawed from the metal-ice stage of brittleness and warmed to where
they could be run without breaking themselves to bits.

But there were good breaks, too. Presently a former
moonship-pilot--grounded to an administrative job on Luna--on his own
free time checked over the ship. Jones arranged it. With rocket-motors
of adamite--the stuff discovered by pure accident in a steel-mill back
on Earth--the propelling apparatus checked out. The fuel-pumps had been
taken over in fullness of design from fire-engine pumps on Earth. They
were all right. The air-regenerating apparatus had been developed from
the aeriating culture-tanks in which antibiotics were grown on Earth. It
needed only reseeding with algae--microscopic plants which when supplied
with ultraviolet light fed avidly on carbon dioxide and yielded oxygen.
The ship was a rather involved combination of essentially simple
devices. It could be put back into such workability as it had once
possessed with practically no trouble.

It was.

Jones moved into it, with masses of apparatus from the laboratory in the
Lunar Apennines. He labored lovingly, fanatically. Like most spectacular
discoveries, the Dabney field was basically simple. It was almost
idiotically uncomplicated. In theory it was a condition of the space
just outside one surface of a sheet of metal. It was like that
conduction-layer on the wires of a cross-country power-cable, when
electricity is transmitted in the form of high-frequency alterations and
travels on the skins of many strands of metal, because high-frequency
current simply does not flow inside of wires, but only on their
surfaces. The Dabney field formed on the surface--or infinitesimally
beyond it--of a metal sheet in which eddy-currents were induced in
such-and-such a varying fashion. That was all there was to it.

So Jones made the exterior forward surface of the abandoned spaceship
into a generator of the Dabney field. It was not only simple, it was too
simple! Having made the bow of the ship into a Dabney field plate, he
immediately arranged that he could, at will, make the rear of the ship
into another Dabney field plate. The two plates, turned on together,
amounted to something that could be contemplated with startled awe, but
Jones planned to start off, at least, in a manner exactly like the
distress-torp test. The job of wiring up for faster-than-light travel,
however, was not much more difficult than wiring a bungalow, when one
knew how it should be done.

Two freight-rockets came in, picked up by radar and guided to landings
by remote control. The Lunar City beam receiver picked up music aimed up
from Earth and duly relayed it to the dust-heaps which were the
buildings of the city. The colonists and moon-tourists became familiar
with forty-two new tunes dealing with prospective travel to the stars.
One work of genius tied in a just-released film-tape drama titled
"_Child of Hate_" to the Lunar operation, and charmed listeners saw and
heard the latest youthful tenor gently plead, "_Child of Hate, Come to
the Stars and Love._" The publicity department responsible for the
masterpiece considered itself not far from genius, too.

There was confusion thrice and four and five times confounded. Cochrane
came in to dispute furiously with Holden whether it was better to have a
psychopathic personality on the space-ship or to have a legal battle in
the courts. Cochrane won. Jones arrived, belligerent, to do battle for
technical devices which would cost money.

"Look!" said Cochrane harassedly. "I'm not trying to boss you! Don't
come to me for authority! If you can make that ship take off I'll be in
it, and my neck will be in as much danger as yours. You buy what will
keep my neck as safe as possible, along with yours. I'm busy raising
money and fighting off crackpots and dodging lawsuits and getting
supplies! I've got a job that needs three men anyhow. All I'm hoping is
that you get ready to take off before I start cutting out paperdolls.
When can we leave?"

"We?" said Jones suspiciously. "You're going?"

"If you think I'll stay behind and face what'll happen if this business
flops," Cochrane told him, "you're crazy! There are too many people on
Earth already. There's no room for a man who tried something big and
failed! If this flops I'd rather be a frozen corpse with a happy smile
on my face--I understand that in space one freezes--than somebody living
on assisted survival status on Earth!"

"Oh," said Jones, mollified. "How many people are to go?"

"Ask Bill Holden," Cochrane told him. "Remember, if you need something,
get it. I'll try to pay for it. If we come back with picture-tapes of
outer space--even if we only circumnavigate Mars!--we'll have money
enough to pay for anything!"

Jones regarded Cochrane with something almost like warmth.

"I like this way of doing business," he said.

"It's not business!" protested Cochrane. "This is getting something
done! By the way. Have you picked out a destination for us to aim at?"
When Jones shook his head, Cochrane said harassedly; "Better get one
picked out. But when we make out our sail-off papers, for destination
we'll say, 'To the stars.' A nice line for the news broadcasts. Oh, yes.
Tell Bill Holden to try to find us a skipper. An astrogator. Somebody
who can tell us how to get back if we get anywhere we need to get back
from. Is there such a person?"

"I've got him," said Jones. "He checked the ship for me. Former
moon-rocket pilot. He's here in Lunar City. Thanks!"

He shook hands with Cochrane before he left. Which for Jones was an
expression of overwhelming emotion. Cochrane turned back to his desk.

"Let's see ... That arrangement for cachets on stamps and covers to be
taken along and postmarked Outer Space. Put in a stipulation for extra
payment in case we touch on planets and invent postmarks for them ..."

He worked on, while Babs took notes. Presently he was dictating. And as
he talked, frowning, he took a fountain-pen from his pocket and absently
worked the refill-handle. It made ink exude from the pen-point. On the
moon, the surface tension of the ink was exactly the same as on earth,
but the gravity was five-sixths less. So a drop of ink of really
impressive size could be formed before the moon's weak gravity made it
fall.

Dictating as he worked the pen, Cochrane achieved a pear-shaped
mass of ink which was quite the size of a large grape before it fell
into his waste-basket. It was the largest he'd made to date. It
fell--slow-motion--and splashed--violently--as he regarded it with
harried satisfaction.

More time passed. A moon-rocket arrived from Earth. There were new
tourists under the thousand-foot plastic dome. Out by the former
Mars-ship Jones made experiments with small plastic balloons coated with
a conducting varnish. In a vacuum, a cubic inch of air at Earth-pressure
will expand to make many cubic feet of near-vacuum. If a balloon can
sustain an internal pressure of one ounce to the square foot, a
thimbleful of air will inflate a sizeable globe to that pressure. Jones
was arranging tiny Dabney fiel