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 their primary. The nine moons
of Saturn spun about 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 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.
Baggage came up from Earth for Johnny Simms. It was mostly elephant-guns
and ammunition for them. Johnny, as the heir to innumerable millions
back on earth, had had a happy life, but hardly one to give him a
practical view of things. To him, star-travel meant landing on such
exotic planets as the fictioneers had been writing about for a hundred
years or so. He really looked upon the venture into space as a combined
big-game expedition and escape from Lunar City. And he did look forward,
too, to freedom from his family's legal representative and the constant
reminder of ethical and moral values which Johnny preferred happily to
ignore.
Film-tape came up, and cameras to use it in. Every imaginable item an
expedition to space could use or even might use, was thrust upon
Spaceways, Inc. Manufacturers yearned to have their products used in
connection with the hottest news story in decades. There was a steady
trailing of moon-jeeps from the airlocks of Lunar City to the ship.
The time of lunar sunset arrived--503:30 o'clock, half-past five hundred
and three hours. Time was measured from midnight to midnight,
astronomical fashion. The great, blazing sun whose streamer prominences,
even, were too bright to be looked at with the naked eye--the sun neared
and reached the horizon. There was no change in the star-studded sky.
There were no sunset colorings. The incandescent brightness on the
mountains was not lessened in the least. Only the direction of the stark
black shadows shifted.
The glaring sun descended. Its motion was almost infinitely slow. Its
disk was of the order of half a degree of arc, and it took a full hour
to be fully obscured. And then there was at first no difference in the
look of things save that the _Mare Imbrium_--the solidified, arid Sea of
Showers--was as dark as the shadows in the mountains.
They still gleamed brightly. For a very long time the white-hot sunshine
glowed on their flanks. The brightness rose and rose, and blackness
followed it. At long last only the topmost peaks of the Apennines blazed
luridly against a background of stars whose light seemed feeble by
comparison.
Then it was night indeed. But the Earth shone forth, a half-globe of
seas and clouds and continents, vast and nostalgic in the sky. And now
Earthshine fell upon the moon. It was many times brighter than moonlight
ever was upon the Earth. Even at lunar sunset the Earthlight was sixteen
times brighter. At midnight, when the Earth was full, it would be bright
enough for any activity. Actually, the human beings on Luna were nearly
nocturnal in their habits, because it was easier to run moon-jeeps in
frigidity and keep men and machines warm enough for functioning, than it
was to protect them against the more-than-boiling heat of midday on the
moon.
So the activity about the salvaged space-ship increased. There were
electric lights blazing in the demi-twilight, to guide freight vehicles
with their loads. The tourist-jeeps went and returned and went and
returned. The last shipload of travelers from Earth wanted to see the
space-craft about which all the world was talking.
Even Cochrane presently became curious. There came a time when all the
paper-work connected with what had happened was done with, and
conditional contracts drawn up on everything that could be foreseen. It
was time for something new to happen.
Cochrane said dubiously:
"Babs, have you seen the ship?"
She shook her head.
"I think we'd better go take a look at it," said Cochrane. "Do you know,
I've been acting like a damned business man! I've only been out of Lunar
City three times. Once to the laboratory to talk, once to test a
signal-rocket across the crater, and once when the distress-torp went
off. I haven't even seen the nightclub here in the City!"
"You should," said Babs matter-of-factly. "I went once, with Doctor
Holden. The dancing was marvelous!"
"Bill Holden, eh?" said Cochrane. He found himself annoyed. "Took you to
the nightclub; but not to see the ship!"
"The ship's farther," explained Babs. "I could always be found at the
nightclub if you needed me. I went when you were asleep."
"Damn!" said Cochrane. "Hm ... You ought to get a bonus. What would you
rather have, Babs, a bonus in cash or Spaceways stock?"
"I've got some stock," said Babs. "Mr. Bell--the writer, you know--got
in a poker game. He was cleaned out. So I gave him all the money I
had--I told you I cleared out my savings-account before we came up, I
think--for half his shares."
"Either you got very badly stuck," Cochrane told her cynically, "or else
you'll be so rich you won't speak to me."
"Oh, no!" said Babs warmly. "Never!"
Cochrane yawned.
"Let's get out and take a look at the ship. Maybe I can stow cargo or
something, now there's no more paper-work."
Babs said with an odd calm:
"Mr. Jones wanted you out there today--in an hour, he said. I promised
you'd go. I meant to mention it in time."
Cochrane did not notice her tone. He was dead-tired, as only a man can
be who has driven himself at top speed for days on end over a business
deal. Business deals are stimulating only in their major aspects. Most
of the details are niggling, tedious, routine, and boring--and very
often bear-trapped. Cochrane had done, with only Babs' help, an amount
of mental labor that in the offices of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and
Fallowe would have been divided among two vice-presidents, six lawyers,
and at least twelve account executives. The work, therefore, would
actually have been done by not less than twenty secretaries. But Babs
and Cochrane had done it all.
In the moon-jeep on the way to the ship he felt that heavy, exhausted
sense of relaxation which is not pleasurable at all. Babs annoyed him a
little, too. She was late getting to the airlock, and seemed breathless
when she arrived.
The moon-jeep crunched and clanked and rumbled over the gently
undulating lava sea beneath its giant wheels. Babs looked zestfully out
of the windows. The picture was, of course, quite incredible. In the
relatively dim Earthlight the moonscape was somehow softened, and yet
the impossibly jagged mountains and steep cliffsides and the razor-edged
passes of monstrous stone,--these things remained daunting. It was like
riding through a dream in which everything nearby seemed fey and
glamorous, but the background was deathly-still and ominous.
There were the usual noises inside the jeep. The air had a metallic
smell. One could detect the odors of oil, and ozone, and varnish, and
plastic upholstery. There were the crunching sounds of the wheels,
traveling over stone. There was the paradoxic gentleness of all the
jeep's motions because of the low gravity. Cochrane even noted the
extraordinary feel of an upholstered seat when one weighs only one-sixth
as much as back on Earth. All his sensations were dreamlike--but he felt
that headachy exhaustion that comes of overwork too long continued.
"I'll try," he said tiredly, "to see that you have some fun before you
go back, Babs. You'll go back as soon as we dive off into whatever we're
diving into, but you ought to get in the regular tourist stuff up here,
anyhow."
Babs said nothing. Pointedly.
The moon-jeep clanked and rumbled onward. The hissing of steam was
audible. The vehicle swung around a pinnacle of stone, and Cochrane saw
the space-ship.
In the pale Earthlight it was singularly beautiful. It had been designed
to lure investors in a now-defunct promotion. It was stream-lined, and
gigantic, and it glittered like silver. It stood upright on its
tail-fins, and it had lighted ports and electric lights burned in the
emptiness about it. But there was only one moon-jeep at its base. A
space-suited figure moved toward a dangling sling and sat in it. He rose
deliberately toward an open airlock-hatch, and the other moon-jeep moved
soundlessly away back toward Lunar City.
There was no debris about. There was no cargo waiting to be loaded.
Cochrane did see a great metal plate, tilted on the ground, with a large
box attached to it by cables. That would be the generators and the
field-plate for a Dabney field. It was plainly to remain on the moon. It
was not underneath the ship. Cochrane puzzled tiredly over it for a
moment. Then he understood. The ship would lift on its rockets, hover
over the plate--which would be generating its half of the field--and
then Jones would switch on the apparatus in the ship itself. The
forward, needle-pointed nose of the ship would become another generator
of the Dabney field. The ship's inertia, in that field, would be
effectively reduced to a fraction of its former value. The rockets,
which might give it an acceleration of a few hundred feet per second
anywhere but in a Dabney field, would immediately accelerate the ship
and all its contents to an otherwise unattainable velocity. The
occupants of the rocket would lose their relative inertia to the same
degree as the ship. They should feel no more acceleration than from the
same rocket-thrust in normal space. But they would travel--
Cochrane felt that there was a fallacy somehow, in the working of the
Dabney field as he understood it. If there was less inertia in the
Dabney field--why--a rocket shouldn't push as hard in it, because, it
was the inertia of the rocket-gases that gave the rocket-thrust. But
Cochrane was much too tired to work out a theoretic objection to
something he knew did work. He was almost dozing when Babs touched his
arm.
"Space-suits, Mr. Cochrane."
He got wearily into the clumsy costume. But he saw again that Babs wore
the shining-eyed look of rapturous adventure that he had seen her wear
before.
They got out of the moon-jeep, one after the other. The sling came down
the space-ship's gleaming side. They got in it, together. It lifted
them.
The vast, polished hull of the space-ship slid past them only ten feet
away. The ground diminished. They seemed less to be lifted than to float
skyward. And in this sling, in this completely unreal ascent, Cochrane
roused suddenly. He felt the acute unease which comes of height. He had
looked down upon Earth from a height of four thousand miles with no
feeling of dizziness. He had looked at Earth a quarter-million miles
away with no consciousness of depth. But a mere fifty feet above the
surface of the moon he felt like somebody swinging out of a skyscraper
window.
Then the airlock opening was beside them, and the sling rolled inward.
They were in the lock, and Cochrane found himself pushing Babs away from
the unrailed opening. He was relieved when the airlock closed.
Inside the ship, with the space-suits off, there was light and warmth,
and a remarkably matter-of-fact atmosphere. The ship had been built to
sell stock in a scheme for colonizing Mars. Prospective investors had
been shown through it. It had been designed to be a convincing
passenger-liner of space.
It was. But Cochrane found himself not needed for any consultation, and
Jones was busy, and Bill Holden highly preoccupied. He saw Alicia
Keith--but her name was Simms now. She smiled at him but took Babs by
the arm. They went off somewhere.
Cochrane waited for somebody to tell him what to look at and to admire.
He saw Jamison, and Bell, and he saw a man he had not seen before. He
settled down in a deeply upholstered chair. He felt neglected. Everybody
was busy. But mostly he felt tired.
He slept.
Then Babs was shaking his arm, her eyes shining.
"Mr. Cochrane!" she cried urgently. "Mr. Cochrane! Wake up! Go on up to
the control-room! We're going to take off!"
He blinked at her.
"We!" Then he started up, and went five feet into the air from the
violence of his uncalculated movement. "We? No you don't! You go back to
Lunar City where you'll be safe!"
Then he heard a peculiar drumming, rumbling noise. He had heard it
before. In the moonship. It was rockets being tested; being burned;
rockets in the very last seconds of preparation before take-off for the
stars.
He didn't drop back to the floor beside the chair he'd occupied. The
floor rose to meet him.
"I've had our baggage brought on board," said Babs, happily. "I'm going
because I'm a stockholder! Hold on to something and climb those stairs
if you want to see us go up! I'm going to be busy!"