"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 LunarApenninesis 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 toask 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—thesehandicaps 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 andArcturus, 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 hewanted 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, ifJones 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.
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 busytryingto 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 thesestock-holderswere 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 enterpriseshut 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 itspossibilitiesin 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 thatcould 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 Bellthe 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 suddenlydry. 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 onaway 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 duringits 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 thatought 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!"
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 ChristopherColumbus'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 Earthone natural and one artificialswung in splendid circles about their primary. The nine moons of Saturn spun about that planets 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. Threeorfour 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 acut 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 dioxideand 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 forme. 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 field robot-generators with tiny atomic batteries to power them. Each such balloon would be a Dabney field "plate" when cast adrift in emptiness, and its little battery would keep it in operation for twenty years or more.