OPERATION: OUTER SPACE

by

MURRAY LEINSTER

CHAPTER ONE

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

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

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

A part of his mind said indignantly, "_Wait till I get Hopkins on thephone! It was a mixup! He wouldn't send me off anywhere with theDikkipatti Hour depending on me! He's not that crazy!_" But he was onhis way to the space-port, regardless. He'd raged when the messagereached him. He'd insisted that he had to talk to Hopkins in personbefore he obeyed any such instructions. But he was on his way to thespace-port. He was riding in a helicab, and he was making adjustments inhis own mind to the humiliation he unconsciously foresaw. There werereally three levels of thought in his mind. One had adopted a defensivecynicism, and one desperately insisted that he couldn't be asunimportant as his instructions implied, and the third watched the othertwo as the helicab flew with cushioned booming noises over the darkcanyons of the city and the innumerable lonely lights of the rooftops. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He went into the space-port building. He felt himself growing morebitter still. Then he found Bill Holden--Doctor William Holden--standingdejectedly against a wall. 

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

Holden said tiredly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mr. Cochrane!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, Cochrane reminded himself with conscious justice, of coursethere was the very great value of moon-mail cachets to devotees ofphilately. There was the value of the tourist facilities to anybody whocould spend that much money for something to brag about afterward. Therewere the solar-heat mines--running at a slight loss--and various otherfine achievements. There was even a nightclub in Lunar City where onehighball cost the equivalent of--say--a week's pay for a secretary likeBabs. And--

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

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

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

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

Silence. Two heart-beats. Three. 

There was a roar. It was a deep, booming, numbing roar that came fromsomewhere outside the rocket's hull. Simultaneously, something thrustCochrane deep into the foam-cushions of his contour-chair. He felt thecushion piling up on all sides of his body so that it literallysurrounded him. It resisted the tendency of his arms and legs andabdomen to flatten out and flow sidewise, to spread him in a thin layerover the chair in which he rested. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cochrane fought the sensation of fatigue. He had not liked himself foraccepting the orders that had brought him here. They had been issued inbland confidence that he had no personal affairs which could not beabandoned to obey cryptic orders from the secretary of a boss he hadactually never seen. He felt a sort of self-contempt which it would havebeen restful to forget in three-gravity sleep. But he grimaced and heldhimself awake to contemplate the unpretty spectacle of himself and hisactions. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Take my nap for me, " said Cochrane, "or put it back in stock. I don'twant it. I'm perfectly all right. "

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

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

He shrugged. He lay still as she went on to inspect the otherpassengers. There was nothing to do and nothing to see. Travellers weretreated pretty much like parcels, these days. Travel, like televisionentertainment and most of the other facilities of human life, wasdesigned for the seventy-to-ninety-per-cent of the human race whoselikes and dislikes and predilections could be learned exactly bysurveys. Anybody who didn't like what everybody liked, or didn't reactlike everybody reacted, was subject to annoyances. Cochrane resignedhimself to them. 

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

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

"_The sensation of weightlessness you now experience_, " said the voicesoothingly, "_is natural at this stage of your flight. The ship hasattained its maximum intended speed and is still rising to meet thespace platform. You may consider that we have left atmosphere and itslimitations behind. Now we have spread sails of inertia and glide on awind of pure momentum toward our destination. The feeling ofweightlessness is perfectly normal. You will be greatly interested inthe space platform. We will reach it in something over two hours of freeflight. It is an artificial satellite, with an air-lock our ship willenter for refueling. You will be able to leave the ship and move aboutinside the Platform, to lunch if you choose, to buy souvenirs and mailthem back and to view Earth from a height of four thousand miles throughquartz-glass windows. Then, as now, you will feel no sensation ofweight. You will be taken on a tour of the space platform if you wish. There are rest-rooms--. _"

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

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

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

Holden said sickly:

"Go to hell, won't you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Space platform! The ship will be in this air-lock for some three hoursplus for refueling. Warning will be given before departure. Passengershave the freedom of the platform and will be given every possibleprivilege. "

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

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

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

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

"Fine!" said Cochrane. His sense of the ironic deepened. He'd thought hewas an executive and reasonably important. But somebody higher up thanhe was had disposed of him with absent-minded finality, and that man'ssecretary and his own had determined all the details, and he didn'tcount at all. He was a pawn in the hands of firm-partners and assortedsecretaries. "Let me know what my job's to be and how to do it, Babs. "

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

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

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

Cochrane snapped angrily:

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

Holden closed his eyes and said gratefully:

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

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

"All right, Bill, " said Cochrane. "They're gone. Now tell me why all thenot inconsiderable genius in the employ of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins andFallowe, in my person, has been mobilized and sent up to the moon?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cochrane grimaced. 

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

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

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

Babs said urgently:

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

"What starts?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a monstrous space of nothingness immediately before his eyes. It was round and vast and near. It was black with the utter blackness ofthe Pit. It was Earth, seen from its eight-thousand-mile-wide shadow, unlighted even by the Moon. There was no faintest relief from itsabsolute darkness. It was as if, in the midst of the splendor of theheavens, there was a chasm through which one glimpsed the unthinkablenothing from which creation was called in the beginning. Until onerealized that this was simply the dark side of Earth, the spectacle wasone of hair-raising horror. 

After a moment Cochrane said with a carefully steadied voice:

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

"Wait, " said Babs confidently. 

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

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

Within minutes--it seemed in seconds--the line of light was a gloryamong the stars. And then, very swiftly, the blazing orb which was thesun appeared from behind Earth. It was intolerably bright, but it didnot brighten the firmament. It swam among all the myriads of myriads ofsuns, burning luridly and in a terrible silence, with visibly writhingprominences rising from the edge of its disk. Cochrane squinted at itwith light-dazzled eyes. 

Then Babs cried softly:

"Beautiful! Oh, beautiful!"

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

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

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

Cochrane said cynically:

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

He turned away. Then he added sourly:

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

He went back to Holden. Holden was painfully dragging himself back intothe rocket-ship. Cochrane went with him. They returned, weightless, tothe admirably designed contour-chairs in which they had traveled to thisplace, and in which they would travel farther. Cochrane settled down tostare numbly at the wall above him. He had been humiliated enough by theactions of one of the heads of an advertising agency. He found himselfresenting, even as he experienced, the humbling which had been imposedupon him by the cosmos itself. 

Presently the other passengers returned, and the moonship was maneuveredout of the lock and to emptiness again, and again presently rocketsroared and there was further feeling of intolerable weight. But it wasnot as bad as the take-off from Earth. 

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

There was nothing to see, because ports opening on outer space were notsafe for passengers to look through. Mere humans, untrained to keeptheir minds on technical matters, could break down at the spectacle ofthe universe. There could be no activity. 

Some of the passengers took dozy-pills. Cochrane did not. It was againstthe law for dozy-pills to produce a sensation of euphoria, ofwell-being. The law considered that pleasure might lead to addiction. But if a pill merely made a person drowsy, so that he dozed for hourshalfway between sleeping and awake, no harm appeared to be done. Yetthere were plenty of dozy-pill addicts. Many people were not especiallyanxious to feel good. They were quite satisfied not to feel anything atall. 

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

Babs Deane did not take dozy-pills either, but Cochrane knew better thanto be more than remotely friendly with her outside of office hours. Hedid not want to give her any excuse to tell him anything for his owngood. So he spoke pleasantly and kept company only with his ownthoughts. But he did notice that she looked rapt and starry-eyed eventhrough the long and dreary hours of free flight. She was mentallytracking the moonship through the void. She'd know when the continentsof Earth were plain to see, and the tints of vegetation on the twohemispheres--northern and southern--and she'd know when Earth'sice-caps could be seen, and why. 

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

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

Ninety-some hours after blast-off from the space platform, therocket-ship turned end for end and began to blast to kill its velocitytoward the moon. It began at half-gravity--the red glowing sign gavewarning of it--and rose to one gravity and then to two. After days ofno-weight, two gravities was punishing. 

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

Glancing at her, absorbed in her satisfaction, Cochrane suspected thatwith only half an excuse she would explain to him how the severalhundreds of degrees difference in the surface-temperature of the moonbetween midnight and noon made rocks split and re-split and fracture sothat stuff as fine as talcum powder covered every space not too sharplytilted for it to rest on. 

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

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

They were on the moon, but Cochrane felt no elation. In the tedioushours from the space platform he'd thought too much. He was actuallyaware of the humiliations and frustrations most men had to conceal fromthemselves because they couldn't afford expensive psychiatrictreatments. Frustration was the disease of all humanity, these days. Andthere was nothing that could be done about it. Nothing! It simply wasn'tpossible to rebel, and rebellion is the process by which humiliation andfrustration is cured. But one could not rebel against the plain factthat Earth had more people on it than one planet could support. 

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

Things looked bad. 

CHAPTER TWO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They saw Lunar City as they approached it. It was five giant dust-heaps, from five hundred-odd feet in height down to three. There were airlocksat their bases and dust-covered tunnels connecting them, and radar-bowlsabout their sides. But they were dust-heaps. Which was completelyreasonable. There is no air on the moon. By day the sun shines down withabsolute ferocity. It heats everything as with a furnace-flame. At nightall heat radiates away to empty space, and the ground-temperature dropswell below that of liquid air. So Lunar City was a group of domes whichwere essentially half-balloons--hemispheres of plastic brought fromEarth and inflated and covered with dust. With airlocks to permitentrance and exit, they were inhabitable. They needed no framework tosupport them because there were no stormwinds or earthquakes to putstresses on them. They needed neither heating nor cooling equipment. They were buried under forty feet of moon-dust, with vacuum between thedust-grains. Lunar City was not beautiful, but human beings could livein it. 

The jeep-bus carried them a bare half mile, and they alighted inside alock, and another door and another opened and closed, and they emergedinto a scene which no amount of television film-tape could reallyportray. 

The main dome was a thousand feet across and half as high. There weregreen plants growing in tubs and pots. And the air was fresh! It smelledstrange. There could be no vegetation on the rocket and it seemed newand blissful to breathe really freshened air after days of the cannedvariety. But this freshness made Cochrane realize that he'd feel betterfor a bath. 

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

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

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

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

Cochrane approved of her secretarial efficiency. 

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

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

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

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

"Who's he?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presently a written note came from Holden:

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

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

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

Bell, left behind, said cagily:

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

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

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

Cochrane found himself annoyed, without knowing why. 

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

Bell said:

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

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

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

He went back to the table and rejoined Babs. She confided that she'dbeen talking to Johnny Simms' wife. She was nice! But homesick. Cochranesat down and thought morbid thoughts. Then he realized that he wasirritated because Babs didn't notice. He finished his drink and orderedanother. 

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

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

Dabney seemed to think earnestly before he spoke. 

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

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

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

"I would take you over to my laboratory, but I promised my wife I wouldcall her in half an hour from now. Johnny Simms' wife just reminded me. My wife is back on Earth. So you will have to go to the laboratorywithout me and have Mr. Jones show you the proof of my work. A veryintelligent man, Jones--in a subordinate way, of course. Yes. I will getyou a jeep and you can go there at once, and when you come back you cantell me what you plan. But you understand that it is not for myself thatI want credit! It is my discovery! It is terribly important! It isvital! It must not be overlooked!"

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

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

Babs stood up, her eyes shining. 

"May I come, Mr. Cochrane?"

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

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

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

Babs stared with passionate rapture out of a shielded port. There wereimpossibly jagged stones, preposterously steep cliffs. There had been noweather to remove the sharp edge of anything in a hundred million years. The awkward-seeming vehicle trundled over the lava sea toward therampart of mighty mountains towering over Lunar City. It reached a steepascent. It climbed. And the way was remarkably rough and the vehiclespringless, but it was nevertheless a cushioned ride. A bump cannot beharsh in light gravity. The vehicle rode as if on wings. 

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

Holden groaned a little. 

"He's practically a stock model of a rich young man without brainsenough for a job in the family firm, and too much money for anythingelse. Fortunately for his family, he didn't react like JohnnySimms--though they're good friends. A hundred years ago, Dabney'd havegone in for the arts. But it's hard to fool yourself that way now. Fiftyyears ago he'd have gone in for left-wing sociology. But we really aredoing the best that can be done with too many people and not enoughworld. So he went in for science. It's non-competitive. Incapacitydoesn't show up. But he has stumbled on something. It sounds reallyimportant. It must have been an accident! The only trouble is that itdoesn't mean a thing! Yet because he's accomplished more than he everexpected to, he's frustrated because it's not appreciated! What a joke!"

Cochrane said cynically:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cochrane grinned. He whistled softly. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They got out of a tiny airlock that held just one person at a time. Theystarted for the laboratory. And suddenly Cochrane saw Babs staringupward through the dark, almost-opaque glass that a space-suit-helmetneeds in the moon's daytime if its occupant isn't to be fried bysunlight. 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 fromEarth, and it covered sixteen times as much of the sky. Its continentswere plain to see, and its seas, and the ice-caps at its poles gleamedwhitely, and over all of it there was a faintly bluish haze which waslike a glamour; a fey and eerie veiling which made Earth a sight to drawat one's heart-strings. 

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

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

And then there was the interior of the laboratory. It was not whollyfamiliar even to Cochrane, who had used sets on the Dikkipatti Hour ofmost of the locations in which human dramas can unfold. This was aphysics laboratory, pure and simple. The air smelled of ozone andspilled acid and oil and food and tobacco-smoke and other items. Westand Jamison were already here, their space-suits removed. They satbefore beer at a table with innumerable diagrams scattered about. Therewas a deep-browed man rather impatiently turning to face his newvisitors. 

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

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

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

"Shoot it, " said Cochrane to West. It was reasonable to ask West for anexplanation, because he would translate everything into televisableterms. 

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

"Cut, " said Cochrane. 

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

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

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

Cochrane meditatively seated himself. He approved of this Jones, whoseeyebrows practically met in the middle of his forehead. He was not morepolite than politeness required. He did not express employer-likerapture 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-lightradiation-pipe? I can't. "

Cochrane cocked an eye at Jamison, who could extrapolate at the drop ofan 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 starswhen we find that another one's set up a similar plate and is ready tochat with us. There's nothing else. "

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

"Demonstration?" he asked Jones. 

"There are plates across the crater out yonder, " said Jones withoutemotion. "Twenty miles clear reach. I can send a message across and getit relayed twice and back through two angles in about five per cent ofthe time radiation ought to take. "

Cochrane said with benign cynicism:

"Jamison, you work by guessing where you can go. Jones works by guessingwhere he is. But this is a public relations job. I don't know where weare 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 aman accustomed to nearly exact science, when he watches somebody work inone 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 straightpublic-relations set-up. We concoct a story and then let it leak out. Wemake it so good that even the people who don't believe it can't helpspreading it. " He nodded at Jamison. "Right now, Jamison, we want atheory that the sending of radiation at twenty times the speed of lightmeans that there is a way to send matter faster than light--as soon aswe work it out. It means that the inertia-mass which increases withspeed--Einstein's stuff--is not a property of matter, but of space, justas the air-resistance that increases when an airplane goes faster is aproperty of air and not of the plane. Maybe we need to work out a theorythat all inertia is a property of space. We'll see if we need that. Butanyhow, just as a plane can go faster in thin air, so matter--anymatter--will move faster in this field as soon as we get the trick ofit. 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 practicedprofessional:

"When this development has been completed, not only will messages besent at multiples of the speed of light, but matter! Ships! The barrierto the high destiny of mankind; the limitation of our race to a singleplanet of a minor sun--these handicaps crash and will shatter as thegreat minds of humanity bend their efforts to make the Dabneyfaster-than-light principle the operative principle of our ships. Thereare thousands of millions of suns in our galaxy, and not less than onein three has planets, and among these myriads of unknown worlds therewill be thousands with seas and land and clouds and continents, fit formen to enter upon, there to rear their cities. There will be starshipsroaming distant sun-clusters, and landing on planets in the Milky Way. We ourselves will see freight-lines to Rigel and Arcturus, and journeyon passenger-liners singing through the void to Andromeda and Aldebaran!Dabney has made the first breach in the barrier to the illimitablegreatness 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 apublic-relations job on that order? Won't that sort of publicity meetthe requirements? Will your patient be satisfied with that grade ofappreciation?"

Holden drew a deep breath. He said unsteadily:

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

Cochrane laughed unpleasantly. He did not admire himself. His laughtershowed it. 

"What do you want?" he demanded. "You got me a job I didn't want. Youshoved it down my throat! Now there's the way to get it done! What morecan 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 aship go faster than light!"

Cochrane said with exquisite irony:

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

Jones said calmly:

"I will like hell! Look! I discovered this faster-than-light field inthe first place! I sold it to Dabney because he wanted to be famous! Igot 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 someextra stuff I noticed, that I can fit into that theory but nobody elsecan--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 notunusual in my business! He's almost a typical sponsor!"

"When you ask me to throw away starships, " said Jones coldly, "for apublicity feature, I don't play. I won't take the credit for the fieldaway from Dabney. I sold him that with my eyes open. But starships aremore 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 canget 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 somethingreal--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 tohave. I wouldn't mind having some myself. Bill, " he said to Dr. WilliamHolden, "how much nerve has Dabney?"

"Speaking unprofessionally, " said Holden, "he's a worm with wants. Hehasn'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 thepeak 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, " saidCochrane, "in case you haven't noticed. Bill, if Jones can really makea ship go faster than light--"

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

"Then, " said Cochrane, "I'm literally forced, for Dabney's sake, to dosomething that he'd scream shrilly at if he heard about it. We're goingto 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 goingto take Dabney's discovery--the one he bought publicity rights to--veryseriously indeed. I'm going to get him acclaim. First we break a storyof what Dabney's field means for the future of mankind--and then weprove it! We take a journey to the stars! Want to make your reservationsnow?"

"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 howlittle 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 thoughtI was a big one, and I won't take it! Now I've got an excuse to try tobe a big man! That's reason enough, isn't it?"

Then he glared around the small laboratory under the dust-heap. He wasirritated because he did not feel splendid emotions after making aresolution 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 beingthe instrument of destiny or anything else. He simply felt peevish andannoyed and obstinate about trying the impossible trick. 

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

CHAPTER THREE

It is a matter of record that the American continents were discoveredbecause ice-boxes were unknown in the fifteenth century. There being norefrigeration, 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 nobleenterprise, and to the glory of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, toput up the financial backing for even a crackpot who might get spicescheaper and thereby make the consumption of slightly spoiled meat lessunpleasant. Which was why Columbus got three ships and crews ofjailbirds for them from a government still busy trying to drive theMoors out of the last corner of Spain. 

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

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

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

The psychiatric treatment began with an innocent-seeming news-item fromLunar City saying that Dabney, the so-and-so scientist, had consented toact as consulting physicist to Spaceways, Inc. , for the practicalapplication of his recent discovery of a way to send messages fasterthan light. 

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

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

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

The experts of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe checked on thepublicity given to Dabney. Strict advertising agency accounting figuredthat to date the cost-per-customer-mention of Dabney and his discoverywere the lowest in the history of advertising. Surveys disclosed thatwithin three Earth-days less than 3. 5 of every hundred interviewsquestioned were completely ignorant of Dabney and the prospect of travelto the stars through his discovery. More people knew Dabney's name thanknew the name of the President of the United States!

That was only the beginning. The leading popular-science show jumpedeight points in audience-rating. It actually reached top-twenty ratingwhen it assigned a regular five-minute period to the Dabney Field andits possibilities in human terms. On the sixth day after Jamison'scalculated indiscretion, the public consciousness was literallysaturated with the idea of faster-than-light transportation. Dabney wasmentioned in every interview of every stuffed shirt, he was referredto on every comedy show (three separate jokes had been invented, whichwere developed into one thousand eight hundred switcheroos, mostof them only imperceptibly different from the original trio) andeven Marilyn Winters--Little Aphrodite Herself--was demanding afaster-than-light-travel sequence in her next television show. 

On the seventh day Bill Holden came into the office where Cochraneworked 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 inthe world knows that he is a great scientist. He is appreciated. He ishappily making plans to go back to Earth and address a few learnedsocieties and let people admire him. He can now spend the rest of hislife being the man who discovered the principle by whichfaster-than-light-travel will some day be achieved. Even when the furordies down, he will have been a great man--and he will stay a great manin his own estimation. In short, he's cured. "

Cochrane grinned. 

"Then I'm fired?"

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

Cochrane leaned back in his chair. 

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

Holden nodded. 

"A well-adjusted person does. Dabney's the same person. He's the samefool. But he'll get along all right. A psychiatrist can't change apersonality! All he can do is make it adjust to the world about so theguy 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 stabilizedhim, and that's the rottenest trick anybody can play on anybody! You'veput him into a sort of moral deep-freeze. It's a dirty trick, Bill!"

"Look who's talking!" said Holden wearily. "I suppose the advertisingbusiness 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 theunpopularity their stupidity has produced. But then we tell them to useso-and-so's breath sweetener or whosit's non-immunizing deodorantthey'll immediately become the life of every party they attend! It's alie, of course, but it's a dynamic lie! It gives the frustratedindividual something to do! It sells him hope and thereforeactivity--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 doeshave that much truth in it! Nobody ever gets anything done while theymerely make socially acceptable responses to the things that happen tothem! Take Dabney himself! We've got a hell of a thing coming along nowjust because he wouldn't make the socially acceptable response to havinga rich wife and no brains. He rebelled. So mankind will start moving tothe stars!"

"You still believe it?"

Cochrane grimaced. 

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

Holden shook his head. 

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

Holden blinked. Cochrane said:

"A signal-rocket has an acceleration of about six hundred feet persecond, level flight, no gravity component, mass acceleration only. Itshould have taken a hundred seconds plus to cross that crater--overtwenty 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 gadgetworks!"

Holden drew a deep breath. 

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

"Not a bit of it!" snapped Cochrane. "I don't want him as a patient! I'monly willing to accept him as a customer! But if he wants fame, I'llsell it to him. Not as something to lean his fragile psyche on, butsomething to wallow in! Do you think he could ever get too famous forhis 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 peddlemy fish elsewhere. I'm going to! But I'll give him old-customerpreference. 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 equallylong-drawn-out. Cochrane said impatiently:

"I got out of bed four hours ago. To me that's morning. I'll eat lunchin an hour. That's noon. Say, three hours from now, whatever o'clock itis 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 thejeep. 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 oftime, a strictly lunar "day" contains nearly three hundred fortyEarth-hours. To call one-twelfth of that period an hour would be anaffectation. To call each twenty-four Earth hours a day would have beenabsurd. So the actual period of the moon's rotation was divided intofamiliar time-intervals, and a bulletin-board in the hotel lobby inLunar City notified those interested that: "_Sunday will be from 143o'clock to 167 o'clock A. M. _" There would be another Sunday some timeduring the lunar afternoon. 

Cochrane debated momentarily whether this information could be used inthe publicity campaign of Spaceways, Inc. Strictly speaking, there wassome 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, weretechnically incidental. But Cochrane put his watch away. To talk abouthorology on the moon wouldn't add to Dabney's stature as a phoneyscientist. It didn't matter. 

He went back to the business at hand. Some two years before there hadbeen a fake corporation organized strictly for the benefit of itspromoters. It had built a rocket-ship ostensibly for the establishmentof a colony on Mars. The ship had managed to stagger up to Luna, but nofarther. Its promoters had sold stock on the promise that a ship thatcould barely reach Luna could take off from that small globe with sixtimes as much fuel as it could lift off of Earth. Which was true. Investors put in their money on that verifiable fact. But the truthhappened to be, of course, that it would still take an impossible amountof fuel to accelerate the ship--so heavily loaded--to a speed where itwould reach Mars in one human lifetime. Taking off from Luna would solveonly the problem of gravity. It wouldn't do a thing about inertia. Sothe ship never rose from its landing near Lunar City. The corporationthat had built it went profitably bankrupt. 

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

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

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

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

There was, of course, no sound at all on the moon itself. There was noair to carry it. But from each plastic helmet a six-inch antennaprojected straight upward, and the microwaves of suit-talkies made ajumble 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 isof the utmost importance! Will you come into the laboratory?"

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

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

Cochrane nodded. Dabney, of course, didn't understand the theory of thefield he'd bought fame-rights to. But there was no point in bringingthat up. Johnny Simms beamed at both of them. He was the swimmer Babshad pointed out in the swimming-pool. His face was completely unlinedand placid, like the face of a college undergraduate. He had neverworried about anything. He'd never had a care in the world. He merelylistened with placid interest. 

"I take it, " said Cochrane, "that you don't mind the test being made, solong as you don't have to accept responsibility for its failure--and solong 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 itsucceeds, it will be because of my discovery. "

Cochrane sighed a little. This was a shabby business, but Dabney wouldhave convinced himself, by now, that he was the genius he wanted peopleto believe him. 

"Before the test, " said Cochrane gently, "you make a speech. It will berecorded. You disclaim the crass and vulgar mechanical details andemphasize that you are like Einstein, dealing in theoretic physics only. That you are naturally interested in attempts to use your discovery, butyour 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 willcheck over what Jones did and tell him why. "

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

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

He closed his face-plate as Dabney began to protest. He went into thelock. He knew better than to hold anything up while waiting for aneurotic to make a decision. Dabney had all he wanted, now. From thismoment on he would be frantic for fear of losing it. But there could beno argument outside the laboratory. In the airlessness, anything anybodysaid by walkie-talkie could be heard by everybody. 

When Dabney and Simms followed out of the lock, Cochrane was helpingJones set up the device that had been prepared for this test. It wasreally two devices. One was a very flat cone, much like a coolie-hat andhardly larger, with a sort of power-pack of coils and batteriesattached. The other was a space-ship's distress-signal rocket, designedto make a twenty-mile streak of red flame in emptiness. Nobody had yetfigured out what good a distress signal would do, between Earth andmoon, but the idea was soothing. The rocket was four feet long and sixinches in diameter. At its nose there was a second coolie-hat cone, withother coils and batteries. 

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

He set the signal-torpedo over that cone. The entire set-up was undersix feet tall, and the coolie-hat cones were no more than eighteeninches 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 firstattempted application of my discovery is made with my consent, but thatI am not aware of the mechanical details. As a scientist, my work hasbeen in pure science. I have worked for the advancement of humanknowledge, but the technological applications of my discovery are notmine. Still--if this device does not work, I will take time from my moreimportant researches to inquire into what part of my discovery has beeninadequately understood and applied. It may be that present technologyis not qualified to apply my discovery--"

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

"That's right. I consulted Mr. Dabney about the principles, but theapparatus 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 disinterestlater. Right now, we can go ahead. Mr. Dabney disavows us unless we aresuccessful. Let us let it go at that. " Then he said: "The observatory'sset to track?"

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

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

The voice was not enthusiastic. Cochrane had had to put up his own moneyto have the nearside lunar observatory put a low-power telescope towatch the rocket's flight. In theory, this distress-rocket should make atwenty-mile streak of relatively long-burning red sparks. A tinyauto-beacon in its nose was set to send microwave signals at ten-secondintervals. On the face of it, it had looked like a rather futileperformance. 

"Let's go, " said Cochrane. 

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

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

Jones pointed there in the shadow of the crater-wall, and Babs moved tothe 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 itwas, with all the abruptness of a light going out. There was a flurry ofthe most brilliant imaginable carmine flame. That light remained. Butthe rocket did not so much rise as disappear. 

Cochrane jerked his head up. He was close to the line of the rocket'sascent. He could see a trail of red sparks which stretched toinvisibility. It was an extraordinarily thin line. The separate flecksof crimson light which comprised it were distant in space. They were sofar from each other that the signal-rocket was a complete failure as adevice 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 therocket was no way for a rocket to act. In all expectation, it shouldhave soared skyward with a reasonable velocity, and should haveaccelerated rather more swiftly from the moon's surface than it wouldhave done from Earth. But it should have remained visible during all itsflight. Its trail should have been a thick red line. Instead, the redsparks were so far separated--the trail was so attenuated that it wasvisible only from a spot near its base. The observatory voice said moreblankly still:

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

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

The voice from the observatory squeaked suddenly. This was not one ofthe highly-placed astronomers, but part of the mechanical staff who'dbeen 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-beaconin the vanished rocket. The signal-sound was that of a radar pulse, beginning at low pitch and rising three octaves in the tenth of asecond. At middle C--the middle of the range of a piano--there was amomentary spurt of extra volume. But in the relayed signal that louderinstant 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. Itwas easily fifteen. Even he could figure out what that meant! Asignal-source that stretched ten seconds of interval at source tofifteen 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 beepsounded. The spurt of sound had dropped a full octave. Thesignal-rocket, traveling normally, might have attained a maximumvelocity of some two thousand feet per second. It was now moving at aspeed 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-receptorreceiver had been stepped up to maximum amplification. The signal wasdistinct, but very faint indeed. And the rocket was then traveling--soit was later computed--at seven-eighths of the speed of light. Betweenthe flat cone on the front of the distress-torpedo, and the flat cone onthe ground, a field of force existed. The field was not on the backsurface of the torpedo's cone, but before the front surface. It wentback to the moon from there, so all the torpedo and its batteries werein the columnar stressed space. And an amount of rocket-push that shouldhave sent the four-foot torpedo maybe twenty miles during its period ofburning, had actually extended its flight to more than thirty-sevenhundred miles before the red sparks were too far separated to be tracedany farther, and by then had kicked the torpedo up impossibly close tolight-speed. 

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

Jones rode back to Lunar City with Cochrane and Holden and Babs. Hisface 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 thepublicity releases Mr. Bell turns out from what Mr. West and Mr. Jamisontell him?"

"I don't think it matters, " said Cochrane. "The newsmen will pump Westand Jamison empty, anyhow. It's all right. In fact, it's better than ourown releases would be. They'll contradict each other. It'll sound moreauthentic that way. We're building up a customer-demand forinformation. "

The small moon-jeep rolled and bumped gently down the long, improbablehighway back to Lunar City. Its engine ran smoothly, as steam-enginesalways do. It ran on seventy per cent hydrogen peroxide, first developedas a fuel back in the 1940s for the pumps of the V2 rockets that triedto win the Second World War for Germany. When hydrogen peroxide comes incontact with a catalyst, such as permanganate of potash, it breaks downinto oxygen and water. But the water is in the form of high-pressuresteam, which is used in engines. The jeep's fuel supplied steam forpower and its ashes were water to drink and oxygen to breathe. Steam ranall 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 systemwould give me. I boosted the field intensity this time. The results werepretty good. I'm thinking--suppose I made the field with a strobe-lightpower-pack--or maybe a spot-welding unit. Even a portable strobe-lightgives 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 billionwatts in it? It might be practically like matter-transmission, though itwould really be only high-speed travel. I think I've got to work on thatidea a little . .. "

Cochrane digested the information in silence. 

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

Holden said moodily:

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

"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 forsuch things! Here on the moon the cost of everything is preposterous!How can you try out this idea without more capital than you can possiblyraise?"

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

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

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

She hesitated and then flushed. The moon-jeep crunched and clankedloudly over the trail that led downhill. There was no sound outside, ofcourse. There was no air. But the noise inside the moon-vehicle wasnotable. The steam-motor, in particular, made a highly individualracket. 

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

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

CHAPTER FOUR

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

There was a four-second pause. About two seconds for his voice to reachEarth. 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 onlytravels at the speed of light. You're not talking from one continent toanother. Save tolls. Yes or no?"

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

Cochrane leaned back in his chair. His eyes blinked wearily. He'd spenthours 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'sdone. He can spend money. And you can transmit my resignation toKursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe. And since this is a pretty riskyoperation, you'd better send a service message asking what you're to dowith yourself. They'll probably tell you to take the next rocket backand report to the secretarial pool, I'm afraid. The same fate probablyawaits West and Jamison and Bell. "

Babs said guiltily:

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

"What now?" demanded Cochrane. 

"The publicity on the torp-test, " said Babs guiltily, "was so goodthat the firm was worried for fear we'd seem to be doing it fora client of the firm--which we are. So we've all been put on aleave-with-expenses-and-pay status. Officially, we're all sick and thefirm 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 betelevision's fair-haired boy. He'll go on Marilyn Winter's show, I'llbet, because that has the biggest audience on the planet. He'll lectureLittle Aphrodite Herself on the constants of space and she'll flutterher eyelashes at him and shove her chest-measurements in his directionand 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 tooimpossible even for the advertising business! But I failed! I failed!You and my official gang, then, are here with the firm's blessing, freeof 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 amatter of pure vanity. But Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe do movein a mysterious way to latch onto a fast buck! I'm going to get somesleep. Is there anything else you've had to use your judgment on?"

"The contracts for re-broadcast of the torp-test. The original broadcasthad 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 thetorp-test film-tape, so much. It was to be re-run with a popularizationof the technical details by West, and a lurid extrapolation of things tocome by Jamison. The sponsors who got hold of commercial time with thatexpanded and souped-up version would expect, and get, an audience-ratingunparalleled in history. Dabney was to take a bow on the rebroadcast, too--very much the dignified and aloof scientist. There were otherinterviews. Dabney again, from a script written by Bell. And Jones. Jones hated the idea of being interviewed, but he had faced abeam-camera and answered idiotic questions, and gone angrily back to hiswork. 

Spaceways, Inc. , had a bank-account already amounting to more thantwenty years of Cochrane's best earning-power. He was selling publicityfor sponsors to hang their commercials on, in a strict parallel toChristopher Columbus' selling of spices to come. But Cochrane wasdelivering for cash. Freight-rockets were on the way moonward now, whosecargoes of supplies for a space-journey Cochrane was accepting only whena bonus in money was paid for the right to brag about it. So-and-so'soxygen 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 couldonly start off in a fleet instead of a single ship, Babs, we'd not onlybe equipped but so rich before we started that we'd want to stay home toenjoy it!" He yawned prodigiously. "I'm going to get some sleep. Don'tlet me sleep too long!"

He went off to his hotel-room and was out cold before his head haddrifted down to its pillow. But he was not pleased with himself. Itannoyed him that his revolt against being an expendable employee hadtaken the form of acting like one of his former bosses in collectingruthlessly for the brains--in the case of Jones--and the neuroticidiosyncrasies--in the case of Dabney--of other men. The gesture bywhich he had become independent was not quite the splendid, scornful onehe'd have liked. The fact that this sort of gesture worked, and nothingelse would have, did not make him feel better. 

But he slept. 

He dreamed that he was back at his normal business of producing atelevision show. Nobody but himself cared whether the show went on ornot. The actual purpose of all his subordinates seemed to be to cut asmany throats among their fellow-workers as possible--in a business way, of course--so that by their own survival they might succeed to a betterjob and higher pay. This is what is called the fine spirit of teamworkby 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 itsnormal course. The two moons of Earth--one natural and oneartificial--swung in splendid circles about. A psychiatrist should notbe the means of associ-[Missing text] that planet's divided rings. Thered spot of Jupiter and the bands on that gas-giant world moved inorderly fashion about its circumference. Light-centuries away, giantCepheid suns expanded monstrously and contracted again, rather morerapidly than their gravitational fields could account for. Double starssedately swung about each other. Comets reached their farthest pointsand, mere aggregations of frigid jagged stones and metal, prepared foranother 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--whomCochrane vaguely remembered. Then he did a double take. He did rememberher. Three or four years before she'd been the outstanding televisionpersonality of the year. She'd been pretty, but not so pretty that youdidn't realize that she was a person. She was everything that MarilynWinters 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. Shelooked patient. And an expression of patience, on a woman's face, iscertainly 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 theswimming-pool the day we got here. "

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

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

Cochrane sat down--not hard, because it was impossible to sit down hardon 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 understandsyou're going to take a trip out to the stars. He wants to go along. He'svery 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 psychopathicpersonality. He's sane and quite bright and rather dear in his way, buthe simply can't remember what is right and wrong. Especially when hegets excited. When they fixed up Lunar City as an international colony, by sheer oversight they forgot to arrange for extradition from it. SoJohnny 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. Thelawyer his family keeps up here to watch over him is thrilled, too. Hewants to go back and visit his family. And as a stockholder, Johnny cankeep you from taking a ship or any other corporate property out of thejurisdiction of the courts. But he'd rather go with you. Of course Ihave 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 toAlicia. "Why do you want to go? I don't know whether it'll be dangerousor not. "

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

A few moments later she went away, very pleasantly and very calmly. Herhusband had no sense of right or wrong--not in action, anyhow. She triedto keep him from doing too much damage by exercising the knowledge shehad of what was fair and what was not. Cochrane grimaced and told Babsto 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 offLuna. 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 hasto do before any achievement of consequence can come about. Pioneerefforts, in particular, require the same sort of clearing-away processas the settling of a frontier farm. Instead of trees to be choppedand dug up by the roots, there are the gratuitous obstructionistswho have to be chopped off at the ankles in a business way, andthe people who exercise infinite ingenuity trying to get a cut ofsomething--anything--somebody else is doing. And of course there arethe publicity-hounds. Since Spaceways was being financed on sales ofpublicity 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 freeadvertisement by press conferences about the injury done his client bySpaceways, Inc. , who had stolen his invention to travel through spacefaster than light. Somebody in the Senate made a speech accusing theSpaceway project of being a political move by the party in power forsome dire ultimate purpose. 

Ultimately the crackpot inventor would get on the air and announcetriumphantly that only part of his invention had been stolen, becausehe'd been too smart to write it down or tell anybody, and he wouldn'ttell anybody--not even a court--the full details of his invention unlesspaid twenty-five million in cash down, and royalties afterward. Theproject for a congressional investigation of Spaceways would die incommittee. 

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

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

It was. 

Jones moved into it, with masses of apparatus from the laboratory in theLunar Apennines. He labored lovingly, fanatically. Like most spectaculardiscoveries, the Dabney field was basically simple. It was almostidiotically uncomplicated. In theory it was a condition of the spacejust outside one surface of a sheet of metal. It was like thatconduction-layer on the wires of a cross-country power-cable, whenelectricity is transmitted in the form of high-frequency alterations andtravels on the skins of many strands of metal, because high-frequencycurrent simply does not flow inside of wires, but only on theirsurfaces. The Dabney field formed on the surface--or infinitesimallybeyond it--of a metal sheet in which eddy-currents were induced insuch-and-such a varying fashion. That was all there was to it. 

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

Two freight-rockets came in, picked up by radar and guided to landingsby remote control. The Lunar City beam receiver picked up music aimed upfrom Earth and duly relayed it to the dust-heaps which were thebuildings of the city. The colonists and moon-tourists became familiarwith 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 andheard the latest youthful tenor gently plead, "_Child of Hate, Come tothe Stars and Love. _" The publicity department responsible for themasterpiece considered itself not far from genius, too. 

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

"Look!" said Cochrane harassedly. "I'm not trying to boss you! Don'tcome to me for authority! If you can make that ship take off I'll be init, and my neck will be in as much danger as yours. You buy what willkeep my neck as safe as possible, along with yours. I'm busy raisingmoney and fighting off crackpots and dodging lawsuits and gettingsupplies! I've got a job that needs three men anyhow. All I'm hoping isthat 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 businessflops, " Cochrane told him, "you're crazy! There are too many people onEarth already. There's no room for a man who tried something big andfailed! If this flops I'd rather be a frozen corpse with a happy smileon my face--I understand that in space one freezes--than somebody livingon 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 ofouter space--even if we only circumnavigate Mars!--we'll have moneyenough 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 somethingdone! By the way. Have you picked out a destination for us to aim at?"When Jones shook his head, Cochrane said harassedly; "Better get onepicked out. But when we make out our sail-off papers, for destinationwe'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. Somebodywho can tell us how to get back if we get anywhere we need to get backfrom. Is there such a person?"

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

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

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

He worked on, while Babs took notes. Presently he was dictating. And ashe talked, frowning, he took a fountain-pen from his pocket and absentlyworked the refill-handle. It made ink exude from the pen-point. On themoon, 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 reallyimpressive size could be formed before the moon's weak gravity made itfall. 

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

More time passed. A moon-rocket arrived from Earth. There were newtourists under the thousand-foot plastic dome. Out by the formerMars-ship Jones made experiments with small plastic balloons coated witha conducting varnish. In a vacuum, a cubic inch of air at Earth-pressurewill expand to make many cubic feet of near-vacuum. If a balloon cansustain an internal pressure of one ounce to the square foot, athimbleful of air will inflate a sizeable globe to that pressure. Joneswas arranging tiny Dabney field robot-generators with tiny atomicbatteries to power them. Each such balloon would be a Dabney field"plate" when cast adrift in emptiness, and its little battery would keepit in operation for twenty years or more. 

Baggage came up from Earth for Johnny Simms. It was mostly elephant-gunsand ammunition for them. Johnny, as the heir to innumerable millionsback on earth, had had a happy life, but hardly one to give him apractical view of things. To him, star-travel meant landing on suchexotic planets as the fictioneers had been writing about for a hundredyears or so. He really looked upon the venture into space as a combinedbig-game expedition and escape from Lunar City. And he did look forward, too, to freedom from his family's legal representative and the constantreminder of ethical and moral values which Johnny preferred happily toignore. 

Film-tape came up, and cameras to use it in. Every imaginable item anexpedition to space could use or even might use, was thrust uponSpaceways, Inc. Manufacturers yearned to have their products used inconnection with the hottest news story in decades. There was a steadytrailing 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 hundredand 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 nearedand reached the horizon. There was no change in the star-studded sky. There were no sunset colorings. The incandescent brightness on themountains was not lessened in the least. Only the direction of the starkblack shadows shifted. 

The glaring sun descended. Its motion was almost infinitely slow. Itsdisk was of the order of half a degree of arc, and it took a full hourto be fully obscured. And then there was at first no difference in thelook of things save that the _Mare Imbrium_--the solidified, arid Sea ofShowers--was as dark as the shadows in the mountains. 

They still gleamed brightly. For a very long time the white-hot sunshineglowed on their flanks. The brightness rose and rose, and blacknessfollowed it. At long last only the topmost peaks of the Apennines blazedluridly against a background of stars whose light seemed feeble bycomparison. 

Then it was night indeed. But the Earth shone forth, a half-globe ofseas and clouds and continents, vast and nostalgic in the sky. And nowEarthshine fell upon the moon. It was many times brighter than moonlightever was upon the Earth. Even at lunar sunset the Earthlight was sixteentimes brighter. At midnight, when the Earth was full, it would be brightenough for any activity. Actually, the human beings on Luna were nearlynocturnal in their habits, because it was easier to run moon-jeeps infrigidity and keep men and machines warm enough for functioning, than itwas to protect them against the more-than-boiling heat of midday on themoon. 

So the activity about the salvaged space-ship increased. There wereelectric lights blazing in the demi-twilight, to guide freight vehicleswith their loads. The tourist-jeeps went and returned and went andreturned. The last shipload of travelers from Earth wanted to see thespace-craft about which all the world was talking. 

Even Cochrane presently became curious. There came a time when all thepaper-work connected with what had happened was done with, andconditional contracts drawn up on everything that could be foreseen. Itwas 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 LunarCity three times. Once to the laboratory to talk, once to test asignal-rocket across the crater, and once when the distress-torp wentoff. I haven't even seen the nightclub here in the City!"

"You should, " said Babs matter-of-factly. "I went once, with DoctorHolden. The dancing was marvelous!"

"Bill Holden, eh?" said Cochrane. He found himself annoyed. "Took you tothe nightclub; but not to see the ship!"

"The ship's farther, " explained Babs. "I could always be found at thenightclub if you needed me. I went when you were asleep. "

"Damn!" said Cochrane. "Hm . .. You ought to get a bonus. What would yourather have, Babs, a bonus in cash or Spaceways stock?"

"I've got some stock, " said Babs. "Mr. Bell--the writer, you know--gotin a poker game. He was cleaned out. So I gave him all the money Ihad--I told you I cleared out my savings-account before we came up, Ithink--for half his shares. "

"Either you got very badly stuck, " Cochrane told her cynically, "or elseyou'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 orsomething, 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 promisedyou'd go. I meant to mention it in time. "

Cochrane did not notice her tone. He was dead-tired, as only a man canbe who has driven himself at top speed for days on end over a businessdeal. Business deals are stimulating only in their major aspects. Mostof the details are niggling, tedious, routine, and boring--and veryoften bear-trapped. Cochrane had done, with only Babs' help, an amountof mental labor that in the offices of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins andFallowe would have been divided among two vice-presidents, six lawyers, and at least twelve account executives. The work, therefore, wouldactually have been done by not less than twenty secretaries. But Babsand Cochrane had done it all. 

In the moon-jeep on the way to the ship he felt that heavy, exhaustedsense of relaxation which is not pleasurable at all. Babs annoyed him alittle, too. She was late getting to the airlock, and seemed breathlesswhen she arrived. 

The moon-jeep crunched and clanked and rumbled over the gentlyundulating lava sea beneath its giant wheels. Babs looked zestfully outof the windows. The picture was, of course, quite incredible. In therelatively dim Earthlight the moonscape was somehow softened, and yetthe impossibly jagged mountains and steep cliffsides and the razor-edgedpasses of monstrous stone, --these things remained daunting. It was likeriding through a dream in which everything nearby seemed fey andglamorous, but the background was deathly-still and ominous. 

There were the usual noises inside the jeep. The air had a metallicsmell. One could detect the odors of oil, and ozone, and varnish, andplastic upholstery. There were the crunching sounds of the wheels, traveling over stone. There was the paradoxic gentleness of all thejeep's motions because of the low gravity. Cochrane even noted theextraordinary feel of an upholstered seat when one weighs only one-sixthas much as back on Earth. All his sensations were dreamlike--but he feltthat headachy exhaustion that comes of overwork too long continued. 

"I'll try, " he said tiredly, "to see that you have some fun before yougo back, Babs. You'll go back as soon as we dive off into whatever we'rediving 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 wasaudible. The vehicle swung around a pinnacle of stone, and Cochrane sawthe space-ship. 

In the pale Earthlight it was singularly beautiful. It had been designedto lure investors in a now-defunct promotion. It was stream-lined, andgigantic, and it glittered like silver. It stood upright on itstail-fins, and it had lighted ports and electric lights burned in theemptiness about it. But there was only one moon-jeep at its base. Aspace-suited figure moved toward a dangling sling and sat in it. He rosedeliberately toward an open airlock-hatch, and the other moon-jeep movedsoundlessly 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 largebox attached to it by cables. That would be the generators and thefield-plate for a Dabney field. It was plainly to remain on the moon. Itwas not underneath the ship. Cochrane puzzled tiredly over it for amoment. Then he understood. The ship would lift on its rockets, hoverover the plate--which would be generating its half of the field--andthen Jones would switch on the apparatus in the ship itself. Theforward, needle-pointed nose of the ship would become another generatorof the Dabney field. The ship's inertia, in that field, would beeffectively reduced to a fraction of its former value. The rockets, which might give it an acceleration of a few hundred feet per secondanywhere but in a Dabney field, would immediately accelerate the shipand all its contents to an otherwise unattainable velocity. Theoccupants of the rocket would lose their relative inertia to the samedegree as the ship. They should feel no more acceleration than from thesame rocket-thrust in normal space. But they would travel--

Cochrane felt that there was a fallacy somehow, in the working of theDabney field as he understood it. If there was less inertia in theDabney field--why--a rocket shouldn't push as hard in it, because, itwas the inertia of the rocket-gases that gave the rocket-thrust. ButCochrane was much too tired to work out a theoretic objection tosomething he knew did work. He was almost dozing when Babs touched hisarm. 

"Space-suits, Mr. Cochrane. "

He got wearily into the clumsy costume. But he saw again that Babs worethe shining-eyed look of rapturous adventure that he had seen her wearbefore. 

They got out of the moon-jeep, one after the other. The sling came downthe space-ship's gleaming side. They got in it, together. It liftedthem. 

The vast, polished hull of the space-ship slid past them only ten feetaway. The ground diminished. They seemed less to be lifted than to floatskyward. And in this sling, in this completely unreal ascent, Cochraneroused suddenly. He felt the acute unease which comes of height. He hadlooked down upon Earth from a height of four thousand miles with nofeeling of dizziness. He had looked at Earth a quarter-million milesaway with no consciousness of depth. But a mere fifty feet above thesurface of the moon he felt like somebody swinging out of a skyscraperwindow. 

Then the airlock opening was beside them, and the sling rolled inward. They were in the lock, and Cochrane found himself pushing Babs away fromthe 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 tosell stock in a scheme for colonizing Mars. Prospective investors hadbeen shown through it. It had been designed to be a convincingpassenger-liner of space. 

It was. But Cochrane found himself not needed for any consultation, andJones was busy, and Bill Holden highly preoccupied. He saw AliciaKeith--but her name was Simms now. She smiled at him but took Babs bythe 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. Hesettled down in a deeply upholstered chair. He felt neglected. Everybodywas 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 tothe 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 theviolence of his uncalculated movement. "We? No you don't! You go back toLunar City where you'll be safe!"

Then he heard a peculiar drumming, rumbling noise. He had heard itbefore. In the moonship. It was rockets being tested; being burned;rockets in the very last seconds of preparation before take-off for thestars. 

He didn't drop back to the floor beside the chair he'd occupied. Thefloor rose to meet him. 

"I've had our baggage brought on board, " said Babs, happily. "I'm goingbecause I'm a stockholder! Hold on to something and climb those stairsif you want to see us go up! I'm going to be busy!"

CHAPTER FIVE

The physical sensations of ascending to the ship's control-room wereweird in the extreme. Cochrane had just been wakened from a worn-outsleep, and it was always startling on the moon to wake and find one'sself weighing one-sixth of normal. It took seconds to remember how onegot that way. But on the way up the stairs, Cochrane was furtherconfused by the fact that the ship was surging this way and swayingthat. It moved above the moon's surface to get over the tilted flatDabney field plate on the ground a hundred yards from the ship'soriginal position. 

The Dabney field, obviously, was not in being. The ship hovered on itsrockets. They had been designed to lift it off of Earth--and theyhad--against six times the effective gravity here, and with anacceleration of more gravities on top of that. So the ship rose lightly, almost skittishly. When gyros turned to make it drift sidewise--as ahelicopter tilts in Earth's atmosphere--it fairly swooped to a newposition. Somebody jockeyed it this way and that. 

Cochrane got to the control-room by holding on with both hands torailings. He was angry and appalled. 

The control-room was a hemisphere, with vertical vision-screenspicturing the stars overhead. Jones stood in an odd sort of harnessbeside a set of control-switches that did not match the smoothlydesigned other controls of the ship. He looked out of a plastic blister, by which he could see around and below the ship. He made urgent signalsto a man Cochrane had never seen before, who sat in a strap-chair beforemany other complex controls with his hands playing back and forth uponthem. A loudspeaker blatted unmusically. It was Dabney's voice, highlyagitated and uneasy. 

"_ . .. My work for the advancement of science has been applied by otherminds. I need to specify that if the experiment now about to begin doesnot succeed, it will not invalidate my discovery, which has been amplyverified by other means. It may be, indeed, that my discovery is so farahead of present engineering--. _"

"See here!" raged Cochrane. "You can't take off with Babs on board! Thisis dangerous!"

Nobody paid any attention. Jones made frantic gestures to indicate themost delicate of adjustments. The man in the strap-chair obeyed theinstruction with an absorbed attention. Jones suddenly threw a switch. Something lighted, somewhere. There was a momentary throbbing soundwhich was not quite a sound. 

"Take it away, " said Jones in a flat voice. 

The man in the strap-chair pressed hard on the controls. Cochraneglanced desperately out of one of the side ports. He saw themoonscape--the frozen lava sea with its layer of whitish-tan moondust. He saw many moon-jeeps gathered near, as if most of the population ofLunar City had been gathered to watch this event. He saw theextraordinary nearness of the moon's horizon. 

But it was the most momentary of glimpses. As he opened his mouth toroar a protest, he felt the upward, curiously comforting thrust ofacceleration to one full Earth-gravity. 

The moonscape was snatched away from beneath the ship. It did notdescend. The ship did not seem to rise. The moon itself diminished andvanished like a pricked bubble. The speed of its disappearance wasnot--it specifically was not--attributable to one earth-gravity of liftapplied on a one-sixth-gravity moon. 

The loudspeaker hiccoughed and was silent. Cochrane uttered the roar hehad started before the added acceleration began. But it was useless. Outthe side-port, he saw the stars. They were not still and changeless andwinking, as they appeared from the moon. These stars seemed to stiruneasily, to shift ever so slightly among themselves, like flecks ofbright color drifting on a breeze. 

Jones said in an interested voice:

"Now we'll try the booster. "

He threw another switch. And again there was a momentary throbbing soundwhich was not quite a sound. It was actually a sensation, which oneseemed to feel all through one's body. It lasted only the fraction of asecond, but while it lasted the stars out the side-ports ceased to bestars. They became little lines of light, all moving toward the ship'sstern but at varying rates of speed. Some of them passed beyond view. Some of them moved only a little. But all shifted. 

Then they were again tiny spots of light, of innumerable tints andcolors, of every conceivably degree of brightness, stirring and movingever-so-slightly with relation to each other. 

"The devil!" said Cochrane, raging. 

Jones turned to him. And Jones was not quite poker-faced, now. Notquite. He looked even pleased. Then his face went back to impassivenessagain. 

"It worked, " he said mildly. 

"I know it worked!" sputtered Cochrane. "But--where are we? How far didwe come?"

"I haven't the least idea, " said Jones mildly as before. "Does itmatter?"

Cochrane glared at him. Then he realized how completely too late it wasto protest anything. 

The man he had seen absorbed in the handling of controls now lifted hishands from the board. The rockets died. There was a vast silence, andweightlessness. Cochrane weighed nothing. This was free flightagain--like practically all of the ninety-odd hours from the spaceplatform to the moon. The pilot left the controls and in an accustomedfashion soared to a port on the opposite side of the room. He gazed out, and then behind, and said in a tone of astonished satisfaction:

"This is good!--There's the sun!"

"How far?" asked Jones. 

"It's fifth magnitude, " said the pilot happily. "We really did pile onthe horses!"

Jones looked momentarily pleased again. Cochrane said in a voice thateven to himself sounded outraged:

"You mean the sun's a fifth-magnitude star from here? What the devilhappened?"

"Booster, " said Jones, nearly with enthusiasm. "When the field was justa radiation speed-up, I used forty milliamperes of current to the squarecentimetre of field-plate. That was the field-strength when we sent thesignal-rocket across the crater. For the distress-torpedo test, Istepped the field-strength up. I used a tenth of an ampere per squarecentimetre. I told you! And don't you remember that I wondered whatwould happen if I used a capacity-storage system?"

Cochrane held fast to a hand-hold. 

"The more power you put into your infernal field, " he demanded, "themore speed you get?"

Jones said contentedly:

"There's a limit. It depends on the temperature of the things in thefield. But I've fixed up the field, now, like a spot-welding outfit. Like a strobe-light. We took off with a light field. It's on now--wehave to keep it on. But I got hold of some pretty storage condensers. Ihooked them up in parallel to get a momentary surge of high-amperagecurrent when I shorted them through my field-making coils. Couldn't makeit a steady current! Everything would blow! But I had a surge ofprobably six amps per square centimetre for a while. "

Cochrane swallowed. 

"The field was sixty times as strong as the one the distress-torpedoused? We went--we're going--sixty times as fast?"

"We had lots more speed than that!" But then Jones' enthusiasm dwindled. "I haven't had time to check, " he said unhappily. "It's one of thethings I want to get at right away. But in theory the field shouldmodify the effect of inertia as the fourth power of its strength. Sixtyto the fourth is--. "

"How far, " demanded Cochrane, "is Proxima Centaurus? That's the neareststar to Earth. How near did we come to reaching it?"

The pilot on the other side of the control-room said with a trace lessthan his former zest:

"That looks like Sirius, over there . .. "

"We didn't head for Proxima Centaurus, " said Jones mildly. "It's tooclose! And we have to keep the field-plate back on the moon lined upwith us, more or less, so we headed out roughly along the moon's axis. Toward where its north pole points. "

"Then where are we headed? Where are we going?"

"We're not going anywhere just yet, " said Jones without interest. "Wehave to find out where we are, and from that--"

Cochrane ran his hand through his hair. 

"Look!" he protested. "Who's running this show? You didn't tell me youwere going to take off! You didn't pick out a destination! You didn't--"

Jones said very patiently:

"We have to try out the ship. We have to find out how fast it goes withhow much field and how much rocket-thrust. We have to find out how farwe went and if it was in a straight line. We even have to find out howto land! The ship's a new piece of apparatus. We can't do things with ituntil we find out what it can do. "

Cochrane stared at him. Then he swallowed. 

"I see, " he said. "The financial and business department of Spaceways, Inc. , has done its stuff for the time being. "

Jones nodded. 

"The technical staff now takes over?"

Jones nodded again. 

"I still think, " said Cochrane, "that we could have done with a littleinterdepartmental cooperation. How long before you know what you'reabout?"

Jones shook his head. 

"I can't even guess. Ask Babs to come up here, will you?"

Cochrane threw up his hands. He went toward thespiral-ladder-with-handholds that led below. He went down into the mainsaloon. A tiny green light winked on and off, urgently, on the far side. Babs was seated at a tiny board, there. As Cochrane looked, she pushedbuttons with professional skill. Bill Holden sat in a strap-chair withhis face a greenish hue. 

"We took off, " said Holden in a strained voice. 

"We did, " said Cochrane. "And the sun's a fifth magnitude star fromwhere we've got to--which is no place in particular. And I've just foundout that we started off at random and Jones and the pilot he picked upare now happily about to do some pure-science research!"

Holden closed his eyes. 

"When you want to cheer me up, " he said feebly, "you can tell me we'reabout to crash somewhere and this misery will soon be over. "

Cochrane said bitterly:

"Taking off without a destination! Letting Babs come along! They don'tknow how far we've come and they don't know where we're going! This is ahell of a way to run a business!"

"Who called it a business?" asked Holden, as feebly as before. "Itstarted out as a psychiatric treatment!"

Babs' voice came from the side of the saloon where she sat at avision-tube and microphone. She was saying professionally:

"I assure you it's true. We are linked to you by the Dabney field, inwhich radiation travels much faster than light. When you were a littleboy didn't you ever put a string between two tin cans, and then talkalong the string?"

Cochrane stopped beside her scowling. She looked up. 

"The press association men on Luna, Mr. Cochrane. They saw us take off, and the radar verified that we traveled some hundred of thousands ofmiles, but then we simply vanished! They don't understand how they cantalk to us without even the time-lag between Earth and Lunar City. I wasexplaining. "

"I'll take it, " said Cochrane. "Jones wants you in the control-room. Cameras? Who was handling the cameras?"

"Mr. Bell, " said Babs briskly. "It's his hobby, along with poker-playingand children. "

"Tell him to get some pictures of the star-fields around us, " saidCochrane, "and then you can see what Jones wants. I will do a littlebusiness!"

He settled down in the seat Babs had vacated. He faced the twopress-association reporters in the screen. They had seen the ship's takeoff. It was verified beyond any reasonable question. The microwave beamto Earth was working at capacity to transmit statements from the MoonObservatory, which annoyedly conceded that the Spaceways, Inc. , salvagedship had taken off with an acceleration beyond belief. But, theastronomers said firmly, the ship and all its contents must necessarilyhave been destroyed by the shock of their departure. The accelerationmust have been as great as the shock of a meteor hitting Luna. 

"You can consider, " Cochrane told them, "that I am now an angel, if youlike. But how about getting a statement from Dabney?"

A press-association man, back on Luna, uttered the first profanity everto travel faster than light. 

"All he can talk about, " he said savagely, "is how wonderful he is! Heagrees with the Observatory that you must all be dead. He said so. Canyou give us any evidence that you're alive and out in space? Visualevidence, for broadcast?"

At this moment the entire fabric of the space-ship moved slightly. Therewas no sound of rockets. The ship seemed to turn a little, but that wasall. No gravity. No acceleration. It was a singularly uncomfortablesensation, on top of the discomfort of weightlessness. 

Cochrane said sardonically:

"If you can't take my word that I'm alive, I'll try to get you someproof! Hm. I'll send you some pictures of the star-fields around us. Shoot them to observatories back on Earth and let them figure out forthemselves where we are! Displacement of the relative positions of thestars ought to let them figure things out!"

He left the communicator-board. Holden still looked greenish in hisstrap-chair. The main saloon was otherwise empty. Cochrane made his waygingerly to the stair going below. He stepped into thin air anddescended by a pull on the hand-rail. 

This was the dining-saloon. The ship having been built to impressinvestors in a stock-sales enterprise, it had been beautifully equippedwith trimmings. And, having had to rise from Earth to Luna, and needingto take an acceleration of a good many gravities, it had necessarily tobe reasonably well-built. It had had, in fact, to be an honest job ofship-building in order to put across a phoney promotion. But there weretrimmings that could have been spared. The ports opening upon emptiness, for example, were not really practical arrangements. But everybody butHolden and the two men in the control-room now clustered at those ports, looking out at the stars. There was Jamison and Bell the writer, andJohnny Simms and his wife. Babs had been here and gone. 

Bell was busy with a camera. As Cochrane moved to tell him of the needfor star-shots to prove to a waiting planet that they were alive, JohnnySimms turned and saw Cochrane. His expression was amiable and unawed. 

"Hello, " said Johnny Simms cheerfully. 

Cochrane nodded curtly. 

"I bought West's stock in Spaceways, " said Johnny Simms, amusedly, "because I want to come along. Right?"

"So I heard, " said Cochrane, as curtly as before. 

"West said, " Johnny Simms told him gleefully, "that he was going back toEarth, punch Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe on their separatenoses, and then go down to South Carolina and raise edible snails forthe rest of his life. "

"An understandable ambition, " said Cochrane. He frowned, waiting to talkto Bell, who was taking an infernally long time to focus a camera out ofa side-port. 

"It's going to be good when he tries to cash my check, " said JohnnySimms delightedly. "I stopped payment on it when he wouldn't pick upthe tab for some drinks I invited him to have!"

Cochrane forced his face to impassiveness. Johnny Simms was that way, heunderstood. He was a psychopathic personality. He was completelyinsensitive to notions of ethics. Ideas of right and wrong were ascompletely meaningless to him as tones to a tone-deaf person, or pasteltints to a man who is color-blind. They simply didn't register. His mindwas up to par, and he could be a charming companion. He could experiencethe most kindly of emotions and most generous of impulses, which he putinto practice. But he also had a normal person's impulse to lessadmirable behavior, and he simply could not understand that there wasany difference between impulses. He put the unpleasing ones intopractice too. He'd been on the moon to avoid extradition because of pastimpulses which society called murderous. On this ship it was yet to bediscovered what he would do--but because he was technically sane hislawyers could have prevented a take off unless he came along. Cochrane, at the moment, felt an impulse to heave him out an airlock as a probabledanger. But Cochrane was not a psychopathic personality. 

He stopped Bell in his picture-taking and looked at the first of theprints. They were excellent. He went back to the vision-set to transmitthem back to Luna. He sent them off. They would be forwarded toobservatories on Earth and inspected. They literally could not be faked. There were thousands of stars on each print--with the Milky Way forbackground on some--and each of those thousands of stars would beidentified, and each would have changed its relative position from thatseen on earth, with relation to every other star. Astronomers coulddetect the spot from which the picture had been taken. But to fake asingle print would have required years of computation and almostcertainly there would have been slip-ups somewhere. These pictures wereunassailable evidence that a human expedition had reached a point inspace that had been beyond all human dreaming. 

Then Cochrane had nothing to do. He was a supernumerary member of thecrew. The pilot and Jones were in charge of the ship. Jamison would takecare of the catering, when meal-time came. Probably Alicia Keith--no, Alicia Simms--would help. Nothing else needed attention. The rocketseither worked or they didn't. The air-apparatus needed no supervision. Cochrane found himself without a function. 

He went restlessly back to the control-room. He found Babs lookinghelpless, and Jones staring blankly at a slip of paper in his hands, while the pilot was still at a blister-port, staring at the starsthrough one of those squat, thick telescopes used on Luna for theexamination of the planets. 

"How goes the research?" asked Cochrane. 

"We're stumped, " said Jones painfully. "I forgot something. "

"What?"

"Whenever I wanted anything, " said Jones, "I wrote it out and gave amemo to Babs. She attended to it. "

"My system, exactly, " admitted Cochrane. 

"I wrote out a memo for her, " said Jones unhappily, "asking forstar-charts and for her to get somebody to set up a system ofastrogation for outside the solar system. Nobody's ever bothered to dothat before. Nobody's ever reached even Mars! But I figured we'd needit. "

Cochrane waited. Jones showed him a creased bit of paper, closelywritten. 

"I wrote out the memo and put it in my pocket, " said Jones, "and Iforgot to give it to Babs. So we can't astrogate. We don't know how. Wedidn't get either star-charts or instructions. We're lost. "

Cochrane waited. 

"Apparently Al was mistaken in the star he spotted as our sun, " addedJones. He referred to the pilot, whom Cochrane had not met before. "Anyhow we can't find it again. We turned the ship to look at some morestars, and we can't pick it out any more. "

Cochrane said:

"You'll keep looking, of course. "

"For what?" asked Jones. 

He waved his hand out the four equally-spaced plastic blister-ports. From where he stood, Cochrane could see thousands of thousands of starsout those four small openings. They were of every conceivable color anddegree of brightness. The Milky Way was like a band of diamonds. 

"We know the sun's a yellow star, " said Jones, "but we don't know howbright it should be, or what the sky should look like beyond it. "

"Constellations?" asked Cochrane. 

"Find 'em!" said Jones vexedly. 

Cochrane didn't try. If a moon-rocket pilot could not spot familiarstar-groups, a television producer wasn't likely to see them. And it wasobvious, once one thought, that the brighter stars seen from Earth wouldbe mostly the nearer ones. If Jones was right in his guess that hisbooster had increased the speed of the ship by sixty to the fourthpower, it would have gone some millions of times as fast as thedistress-torpedo, for a brief period (the ratio was actually somethingover nineteen million times) and it happened that nobody had been ableto measure the speed of that test-object. 

Cochrane was no mathematician, but he could see that there was no datafor computation on hand. After one found out how fast an acceleration ofone Earth-gravity in a Dabney field of such-and-such strength speeded upa ship, something like dead reckoning could be managed. But all thatcould be known right now was that they had come a long way. 

He remembered a television show he'd produced, laid in space on animaginary voyage. The script-writer had had one of the characters saythat no constellation would be visible at a hundred light-years from thesolar system. It would be rather like a canary trying to locate thewindow he'd escaped from, from a block away, with no memories of theflight from it. 

Cochrane said suddenly, in a pleased tone:

"This is a pretty good break--if we can keep them from finding out aboutit back home! We'll have an entirely new program, good for athirteen-week sequence, on just this!"

Babs stared at him. 

"Main set, this control-room, " said Cochrane enthusiastically. "We'llget a long-beard scientist back home with a panel of experts. We'lldiscuss our problems here! We'll navigate from home, with the wholebusiness on the air! We'll have audience-identification up to a record!Everybody on Earth will feel like he's here with us, sharing ourproblems!"

Jones said irritably:

"You don't get it! We're lost! We can't check our speed without knowingwhere we are and how far we've come! We can't find out what the shipwill do when we can't find out what it's done! Don't you see?"

Cochrane said patiently:

"I know! But we're in touch with Luna through the Dabney field that gotus here! It transmitted radiation before, faster than light. It'stransmitting voice and pictures now. Now we set up a television showwhich pays for our astrogation and lets the world sit in on the prettieraspects of our travels. Hm. .. . How long before you can sit down on aplanet, after you have all the navigational aids of--say--the four bestobservatories on Earth to help you? I'll arrange for a sponsor--. "

He went happily down the stairs again. This was a spiral stair, and hezestfully spun around it as he went to the next deck below. At thebottom he called up to Babs:

"Babs! Get Bell and Alicia Keith and come along to take dictation! I'mgoing to need some legal witnesses for the biggest deal in the historyof advertising, made at several times the speed of light!"

And he went zestfully to the communicator to set it up. 

And time passed. Data arrived, which at once solved Jones' and thepilot's problem of where they were and how far they had come--it was, actually, 178. 3 light-years--and they spent an hour making further testsand getting further determinations, and then they got a destination. 

They stopped in space to extrude from the airlock a small package whichexpanded into a forty-foot plastic balloon with a minute atomic batteryattached to it. The plastic was an electric conductor. It was afield-plate of the Dabney field. It took over the field from Earth andmaintained it. It provided a second field for the ship to maintain. Theship, then, could move at any angle from the balloon. The Dabney fieldstretched 178. 3 light-years through emptiness to the balloon, and thenat any desired direction to the ship. 

The ship's rockets thrust again--and the booster-circuit came into play. There were maneuverings. A second balloon was put out in space. 

At 8:30 Central U. S. Time, on a period relinquished by otheradvertisers--bought out--a new program went on the air. It was ahalf-hour show, sponsored by the Intercity Credit Corporation--"Buy onCredit Guaranteed"--with ten straight minutes of commercials interjectedin four sections. It was the highest-priced show ever put on the air. Itshowed the interior of the ship's control-rooms, with occasional briefswitches to authoritative persons on Earth for comment on what wasrelayed from the far-off skies. 

The first broadcast ensured the success of the program beyond possibledispute. It started with curt conversation between Jones and the pilot, Al--Jones loathed this part of it, but Al turned out to be something ofa ham--on the problems of approaching a new solar system. Cut tocomputers back on Earth. Back to the control-room of the starship. Pictures of the local sun, and comments on its differentness from thesun that had nourished the human race since time began. 

Then the cameras--Bell worked them--panned down through the ship'sblister-ports. There was a planet below. The ship descended toward it. It swelled visibly as the space-ship approached. Cochrane stood out ofcamera-range and acted as director as well as producer of the opus. Heused even Johnny Simms as an offstage voice repeating stern commands. Itwas corny. There was no doubt about it. It had a large content of ham. 

But it happened to be authentic. The ship had reached another planet, with vast ice-caps and what appeared to be no more than atwenty-degree-wide equatorial belt where there was less than completeglaciation. The rockets roared and boomed as the ship let down into thecloud-layers. 

Television audiences back on Earth viewed the new planet nearly as soonas did those in the ship. The time-lag was roughly three seconds for adistance of 203. 7 light-years. 

The surface of the planet was wild and dramatic beyond belief. Therewere valleys where vegetation grew luxuriantly. There were ranges ofsnow-clad mountains interpenetrating the equatorial strip, and therewere masses of white which, as the ship descended, could be identifiedas glaciers moving down toward the vegetation. 

But as the ship sank lower and lower--and the sound of its rocketsbecame thunderous because of the atmosphere around it--a new featuretook over the central position in one's concept of what the planet wasactually like. 

The planet was volcanic. There were smoking cones everywhere--in thesnow-fields, among the ice-caps, in between the glaciers, and even amongthe tumbled areas whose greenness proved that here was an environmentwhich might be perilous, but where life should thrive abundantly. 

The ship continued to descend toward a great forest near a terminalmoraine. 

CHAPTER SIX

Jamison declaimed, wearing a throat-mike as Bell zestfully panned hiscamera and the ship swung down. It was an impressive broadcast. Therockets roared. With the coming of air about the ship, they no longermade a mere rumbling. They created a tumult which was like the growl ofthunder if one were in the midst of the thunder-cloud. It was a numbingnoise. It was almost a paralyzing noise. But Jamison talked withprofessional smoothness. 

"This planet, " he orated, while pictures from Bell's camera went directto the transmitter below, "this planet is the first world other thanEarth on which a human ship has landed. It is paradoxic that before menhave walked on Mars' red iron-oxide plains and breathed its thin coldair, or fought for life in the formaldehyde gales of Venus, that theyshould look upon a world which welcomes them from illimitableremoteness. Here we descend, and all mankind can watch our descent upona world whose vegetation is green; whose glaciers prove that there isair and water in plenty, whose very smoking volcanoes assure us of itsclose kinship to Earth!"

He lifted the mike away from his throat and framed words with his lips. "_Am I still on?_" Cochrane nodded. Cochrane wore headphones carryingwhat the communicator carried, as this broadcast went through an angledDabney field relay system back to Lunar City and then to Earth. He spokeclose to Jamison's ear. 

"Go ahead! If your voice fades, it will be the best possible sign-off. Suspense. Good television!"

Jamison let the throat-mike back against his skin. The roaring of therockets would affect it only as his throat vibrated from the sound. Itwould register, even so. 

"I see, " said Jamison above the rocket-thunder, "forests of giant treeslike the sequoias of Mother Earth. I see rushing rivers, foaming alongtheir rocky beds, taking their rise in glaciers. We are still too highto look for living creatures, but we descend swiftly. Now we are levelwith the highest of the mountains. Now we descend below their smokingtops. Under us there is a vast valley, miles wide, leagues long. Here acity could be built. Over it looms a gigantic mountain-spur, capped withgreen. One would expect a castle to be built there. "

He raised his eyebrows at Cochrane. They were well in atmosphere, now, and it had been an obvious defect--condition--necessity of the Dabneyfield that both of its plates should be in a vacuum. One was certainlyin air now. But Cochrane made that gesture which in televisionproduction-practice informs the actors that time to cutting is measuredin tens of seconds, and he held up two fingers. Twenty seconds. 

"We gaze, and you gaze with us, " said Jamison, "upon a world that futuregenerations will come to know as home--the site of the first humancolony among the stars!"

Cochrane began to beat time. Ten, nine, eight--. 

"We are about to land, " Jamison declaimed. "We do not know what we shallfind--What's that?" He paused dramatically. "A living creature?--Aliving creature sighted down below! We sign off now--from the stars!"

The ending had been perfectly timed. Allowing for a three-secondinterval for the broadcast to reach the moon, and just about two morefor it to be relayed to Earth, his final word, "Stars!" had been utteredat the precise instant to allow a four-minute commercial by IntercityCredit, in the United States, by Citroen in Europe, by Fabricanos Unidosin South and Central America, and Near East Oil along the Mediterranean. At the end of that four minutes it would be time for stationidentification and a time-signal, and the divers eight-second flashesbefore other programs came on the air. 

The rockets roared and thundered. The ship went down and down. Jamisonsaid:

"I thought we'd be cut off when we hit air!"

"That's what Jones thought, " Cochrane assured him. He bellowed above theoutside tumult, "Bell! See anything alive down below?"

Bell shook his head. He stayed at the camera aimed out a blister-port, storing up film-tape for later use. There was the feel of gravitation, now. Actually, it was the fact that the ship slowed swiftly in itsdescent. 

Cochrane went to a port. The ship continued its descent. 

"Living creature? Where?"

Jamison shrugged. He had used it as a sign-off line. An extrapolationfrom the fact that there was vegetation below. He looked somehowdistastefully out the port at a swiftly rising green ground below. Hewas a city man. He had literally never before seen what looked likehabitable territory of such vast extent, with no houses on it. In avalley easily ten miles long and two wide, there was not a square inchof concrete or of glass. There was not a man made object in view. Thesky was blue and there were clouds, but to Jamison the sight ofvegetation implied rooftops. There ought to be parapets where roofsended to let light down to windows and streets below. He had neverbefore seen grass save on elevated recreation-areas, nor bushes notarranged as landscaping, and certainly not trees other than thedomesticated growths which can grow on the tops of buildings. To Jamisonthis was desolation. On the moon, absence of structures wasunderstandable. There was no air. But here there should be a city!

The ship swayed a little as the rockets swung their blasts to balancethe descending mass. The intended Mars-ship slowed, and slowed, andhovered--and there was terrifying smoke and flame suddenly allabout--and then there was a distinct crunching impact. The rocketscontinued to burn, their ferocity diminished. They slackened again. Andyet again. They were reduced to a mere faint murmur. 

There was a remarkable immobility of everything. It was the result ofgravity. Earth-value gravity, or very near it. There was a distinctpressure of one's feet against the floor, and a feeling of heaviness toone's body which was very different from Lunar City, and more differentstill from free flight in emptiness. 

Nothing but swirling masses of smoke could be seen out the ports. Theyhad landed in a forest, of sorts, and the rocket-blasts had burned awayeverything underneath, down to solid soil. In a circle forty yards aboutthe ship the ground was a mass of smoking, steaming ash. Beyond thatflames licked hungrily, creating more dense vapor. Beyond that stillthere was only coiling smoke. 

Cochrane's headphones yielded Babs' voice, almost wailing:

"_Mr. Cochrane! We must have landed! I want to see!_"

Cochrane pressed the hand-mike button. 

"Are we still hooked up to Lunar City?" he demanded. "We can't be, butare we?"

"_We are_, " said Babs' voice mutinously. "_The broadcast went throughall right. They want to talk to you. Everybody wants to talk to you!_"

"Tell them to call back later, " commanded Cochrane. "Then leave the beamworking--however it works!--and come up if you like. Tell the moonoperator you'll be away for ten minutes. "

He continued to stare out the window. Al, the pilot, stayed in hiscushioned seat before the bank of rocket-controls. The rockets werebarely alight. The ship stayed as it had landed, upright on its triplefins. He said to Jones:

"It feels like we're solid. We won't topple!"

Jones nodded. The rocket-sound cut off. Nothing happened. 

"I think we could have saved fuel on that landing, " said Jones. Then headded, pleased, "Nice! The Dabney field's still on! It has to be startedin a vacuum, but it looks like it can hold air away from itself onceit's established. Nice!"

Babs rushed up the stairs. She gazed impassionedly out of a vision-port. Then she said disappointedly:

"It looks like--"

"It looks like hell, " said Cochrane. "Just smoke and steam and stuff. Wecan hope, though, that we haven't started a forest fire, but have justburned off a landing-place. "

They stared out. Presently they went to another port and gazed out ofthat. The smoke was annoying, and yet it could have been foreseen. Amoon-rocket, landing at its space-port on Earth, heated the tarmac tored-hotness in the process of landing. Tender-vehicles had to wait forit to cool before they could approach. Here the ship had landed inwoodland. Naturally its flames had seared the spot where it came down. And there was inflammable stuff about, which caught fire. So the shipwas in the situation of a phoenix, necessarily nesting in aconflagration. Anywhere it landed the same thing would apply, unless ittried landing on a glacier. But then it would settle down into a lake ofboiling water, amid steam, and could expect to be frozen in as soon asits landing-place cooled. 

Now there was nothing to do. They had to wait. Once the whole shipquivered very slightly, as if the ground trembled faintly under it. Butthere was nothing at which to be alarmed. 

They could see that this particular forest was composed mainly of twokinds of trees which burned differently. One had a central trunk, and itburned with resinous flames and much black and gray-black smoke. Theother was a curious growth--a solid, massive trunk which did not touchground at all, but was held up by aerial roots which supported it aloftthrough very many slender shafts widely spread. Possibly the heavierpart was formed on the ground and lifted as its air-roots grew. 

It was irritating, though, to be unable to see from the ship so long asthe fire burned outside. The pall of smoke lasted for a long time. Inthree hours there were no longer any fiercely blazing areas, but theashes still smouldered and smoke still rose. In three hours and a half, the local sun began to set. There were colorings in the sky, beyond allcomparison glorious. Which was logical enough. When Krakatoa, back onEarth, blew itself to bits in the eighteen hundreds, it sent suchvolumes of dust into the air that sunsets all around the globe werenotably improved for three years afterward. On this planet, smokingcones were everywhere visible. Volcanic dust, then, made nightfallmagnificent past description. There was not only gold and crimson in thewest. The zenith itself glowed carmine and yellow, and those in thespace-ship gazed up at a sky such as none of them could have imaginedpossible. 

The colors changed and changed, from yellow to gold all over the sky, and still the glory continued. Presently there was a deep, deep red, deep past imagining, and presently faint bluish stars pierced it, andthey stared up at new strange constellations-some very brightindeed--and all about the ship there was a bed of white ash with glowingembers in it, and a thin sheet of white smoke still flowed away down thevalley. 

It was long after sunset when Cochrane got up from the communicator. Communication with Earth was broken at last. There was a balloon out inspace somewhere with an atomic battery maintaining all its surface as aDabney field plate. The ship maintained a field between itself and thatplate. The balloon maintained another field between itself and anotherballoon a mere 178. 3 light-years from the solar system. But thesubstance of this planet intervened between the nearer balloon and theship. Jones made tests and observed that the field continued to exist, but was plugged by the matter of this newly-arrived-at world. Cometomorrow, when there was no solid-stone barrier to the passage ofradiation, they could communicate with Earth again. 

But Cochrane was weary and now discouraged. So long as talk with Earthwas possible, he'd kept at it. There was a great deal of talking to bedone. But a good deal of it was extremely unsatisfactory. 

He found Bill Holden having supper with Babs, on the floor below thecommunicator. Very much of the recent talk had been over Cochrane'shead. He felt humiliated by the indignation of scientists who would nottell him what he wanted to know without previous information he couldnot give. 

When he went over to the dining-table, he felt that he creaked fromweariness and dejection. Babs looked at him solicitously, and thenjumped up to get him something to eat. Everybody else was again watchingout the ship's ports at the new, strange world of which they could seenext to nothing. 

"Bill, " said Cochrane fretfully, "I've just been given the dressing-downof my life! You're expecting to get out of the airlock in the morningand take a walk. But I've been talking to Earth. I've been given thedevil for landing on a strange planet without bringing along abacteriologist, an organic chemist, an ecologist, an epidemiologist, anda complete laboratory to test everything with, before daring to take abreath of outside air. I'm warned not to open a port!"

Holden said:

"You sound as if you'd been talking to a biologist with a reputation. You ought to know better than that!"

Cochrane protested:

"I wanted to talk to somebody who knew more than I did! What could I dobut get a man with a reputation?"

Holden shook his head. 

"We psychiatrists, " he observed, "go around peeping under the corners ofrugs at what people try to hide from themselves. We have a worm's-eyeview of humanity. We know better than to throw a difficult problem at aman with an established name! They're neurotic about their reputations. Like Dabney, they get panicky at the idea of anybody catching them in amistake. No big name in medicine or biology would dare tell you that ofcourse it's all right for us to take a walk in the rather prettylandscape outside. "

"Then who will?" demanded Cochrane. 

"We'll make what tests we can, " said Holden comfortingly, "and decidefor ourselves. We can take a chance. We're only risking our lives!"

Babs brought Cochrane a plate. He put food in his mouth and chewed andswallowed. 

"They say we can't afford to breathe the local air at all until we knowits bacteriology; we can't touch anything until we test it as a possibleallergen; we can't. "

Holden grunted. 

"What would those same authorities have told your friend Columbus? On astrange continent he'd be sure to find strange plants and strangeanimals. He'd find strange races of men and he ought to find strangediseases. They'd have warned him not to risk it. _They_ wouldn't!"

Cochrane ate with a sort of angry vigor. Then he snapped:

"If you want to know, we've got to land! We're sunk if we don't gooutside and move around! We'll spoil our story-line. This is thegreatest adventure-serial anybody on Earth ever tuned in to follow! Ifwe back down on exploration, our audience will be disgusted andresentful and they'll take it out on our sponsors!"

Babs said softly, to Holden:

"That's my boss!"

Cochrane glared at her. He didn't know how to take the comment. He saidto Holden:

"Tomorrow we'll try to figure out some sort of test and try the air. I'll go out in a space-suit and crack the face-plate! I can close itagain before anything lethal gets in. But there's no use stepping outinto a bed of coals tonight. I'll have to wait till morning. "

Holden smiled at him. Babs regarded him with intent, enigmatic eyes. 

Neither of them said anything more. Cochrane finished his meal. Then hefound himself without an occupation. Gravity on this planet was verynearly the same as on Earth. It felt like more, of course, because allof them had been subject only to moon-gravity for nearly three weeks. Jones and the pilot had been in one-sixth gravity for a much longertime. And the absence of gravity had caused their muscles to lose toneby just about the amount that the same time spent in a hospital bedwould have done. They felt physically worn out. 

It was a healthy tiredness, though, and their muscles would come backto normal as quickly as one recovers strength after illness--ratherfaster, in fact. But tonight there would be no night-life on thespace-ship. Johnny Simms disappeared, after symptoms of fretfulness akinto those of an over-tired small boy. Jamison gave up, and Bell, and Althe pilot fell asleep while Jones was trying to discuss somethingtechnical with him. Jones himself yawned and yawned and when Al snoredin his face he gave up. They retired to their bunks. 

There was no point in standing guard over the ship. If the bed of hotashes did not guard it, it was not likely that an individual merelysitting up and staring out its ports would do much good. There wereextremely minor, practically unnoticeable vibrations of the ship fromtime to time. They would be volcanic temblors--to be expected. They werenot alarming, certainly, and the forest outside was guarantee of nogreat violence to be anticipated. The trees stood firm and tall. Therewas no worry about the ship. It was perfectly practical, and evennecessary simply to turn out the lights and go to sleep. 

But Cochrane could not relax. He was annoyed by the soreness of hismuscles. He was irritated by the picture given him of the expedition asa group of heedless ignoramuses who'd taken off without star-charts orbacteriological equipment--without even apparatus to test the air ofplanets they might land on!--and who now were sternly warned not to makeany use of their achievement. Cochrane was not overwhelmed by theachievement itself, though less than eighteen hours since the ship andall its company had been aground on Luna, and now they were landed on anew world twice as far from Earth as the Pole Star. 

It is probable that Cochrane was not awed because he had atelevision-producer's point of view. He regarded this entire affair as aproduction. He was absorbed in the details of putting it across. Helooked at it from his own, quite narrow, professional viewpoint. It didnot disturb him that he was surrounded by a wilderness. He consideredthe wilderness the set on which his production belonged, though he wasas much a city man as anybody else. He went back to the control-room. With the ship standing on its tail that was the highest point, and asthe embers burned out and the smoke lessened it was possible to look outinto the night. 

He stared at the dimly-seen trees beyond the burned area, and at thedark masses of mountains which blotted out the stars. He estimated them, without quite realizing it, in view of what they would look like on atelevision screen. When light objects in the control-room rattledslightly, he paid no attention. His rehearsal-studio had been rickety, back home. 

Babs seemed to be sleepless, too. There was next to no light whereCochrane was--merely the monitor-lights which assured that the Dabneyfield still existed, though blocked for use by the substance of aplanet. Babs arrived in the almost-dark room only minutes afterCochrane. He was moving restlessly from one port to another, staringout. 

"I thought I'd tell you, " Babs volunteered, "that Doctor Holden put somealgae from the air-purifier tanks in the airlock, and then opened theouter door. "

"Why?" asked Cochrane. 

"Algae's Earth plant-life, " explained Babs. "If the air is poisonous, itwill be killed by morning. We can close the outer door of the lock, pumpout the air that came from this planet, and then let air in from theship so we can see what happens. "

"Oh, " said Cochrane. 

"And then I couldn't sleep, " said Babs guilelessly. "Do you mind if Istay here? Everybody else has gone to bed. "

"Oh, no, " said Cochrane. "Stay if you like. "

He stared out at the dark. Presently he moved to another port. After amoment he pointed. 

"There's a glow in the sky there, " he said curtly. 

She looked. There was a vast curving blackness which masked the stars. Beyond it there was a reddish glare, as if of some monstrous burning. But the color was not right for a fire. Not exactly. 

"A city?" asked Babs breathlessly. 

"A volcano, " Cochrane told her. "I've staged shows that pretended toshow intellectual creatures on other planets--funny how we've beendreaming of such things, back on Earth--but it isn't likely. Not sincewe've actually reached the stars. "

"Why since then?"

"Because, " said Cochrane, half ironically, "man was given dominion overall created things. I don't think we'll find rivals for that dominion. Ican't imagine we'll find another race of creatures who couldbe--persons. Heaven knows we try to rob each other of dignity, but Idon't think there's another race to humiliate us when we find them!"

After a moment he added:

"Bad enough that we're here because there are deodorants and cosmeticsand dog-foods and such things that people want to advertise to eachother! We wouldn't be here but for them, and for the fact that somepeople are neurotics and some don't like their bosses and some are crazyin other fashions. "

"Some crazinesses aren't bad, " argued Babs. 

"I've made a living out of them, " agreed Cochrane sourly. "But I don'tlike them. I have a feeling that I could arrange things better. I know Icouldn't, but I'd like to try. In my own small way, I'm even trying. "

Babs chuckled. 

"That's because you are a man. Women aren't so foolish. We're realists. We like creation--even men--the way creation is. "

"I don't, " Cochrane said irritably. "We've accomplished somethingterrific, and I don't get a kick out of it! My head is full of businessdetails that have to be attended to tomorrow. I ought to be uplifted. Iought to be gloating! I ought to be happy! But I'm worrying for fearthat this infernal planet is going to disappoint our audience!"

Babs chuckled again. Then she went to the stair leading to thecompartment below. 

"What's the matter?" he demanded. 

"After all, I'm going to leave you alone, " said Babs cheerfully. "You'realways very careful not to talk to me in any personal fashion. I thinkyou're afraid I'll tell you something for your own good. If I stayedhere, I might. Goodnight!"

She started down the stairs. Cochrane said vexedly:

"Hold on! Confound it, I didn't know I was so transparent! I'm sorry, Babs. Look! Tell me something for my own good!"

Babs hesitated, and then said very cheerfully:

"You only see things the way a man sees them. This show, this trip--thiswhole business doesn't thrill you because you don't see it the way awoman would. "

"Such as how? What does a woman see that I don't?"

"A woman, " said Babs, "sees this planet as a place that men and womenwill come to live on. To live on! You don't. You miss all the realimplications of people actually living here. But they're the things awoman sees first of all. "

Cochrane frowned. 

"I'm not so conceited I can't listen to somebody else. If you've got anidea--"

"Not an idea, " said Babs. "Just a reaction. And you can't explain areaction to somebody who hasn't had it. Goodnight!"

She vanished down the stairs. Some time later, Cochrane heard theextremely minute sound of a door closing on one of the cabins threedecks down in the space-ship. 

He went back to his restless inspection of the night outside. He triedto make sense of what Babs had said. He failed altogether. In the end hesettled in one of the over-elaborately cushioned chairs that had madethis ship so attractive to deluded investors. He intended to think outwhat Babs might have meant. She was, after all, the most competentsecretary he'd ever had, and he'd been wryly aware of how helpless hewould be without her. Now he tried painstakingly to imagine what changesin one's view the inclusion of women among pioneers would involve. Heworked out some seemingly valid points. But it was not a congenialmental occupation. 

He fell asleep without realizing it, and was waked by the sound ofvoices all about him. It was morning again, and Johnny Simms wasshouting boyishly at something he saw outside. 

"Get at it, boy!" he cried enthusiastically. "Grab him! That's theway--"

Cochrane opened his eyes. Johnny Simms gazed out and down from ablister-port, waving his arms. His wife Alicia looked out of the sameport without seeming to share his excited approval. Bell had dragged acamera across the control-room and was in the act of focussing itthrough a particular window. 

"What's the matter?" demanded Cochrane. 

He struggled out of his chair. And Johnny Simms' pleasure evaporatedabruptly. He swore nastily, viciously, at something outside the ship. His wife touched his arm and spoke to him in a low tone. He turnedfuriously upon her, mouthing foulnesses. 

Cochrane was formidably beside him, and Johnny Simms' expression of furysmoothed out instantly. He looked pleasant and amiable. 

"The fight stopped, " he explained offhandedly. "It was a good fight. Butone of the creatures wouldn't stay and take his licking. "

Alicia said steadily:

"There were some animals there. They looked rather like bears, only theyhad enormous ears. "

Cochrane looked at Johnny Simms with hot eyes. It was absurd to be sochivalrous, perhaps, but he was enraged. After an instant he turned awayand went to the port. The burned-over area was now only ashes. At itsedge, charcoal showed. And now he could see trees and brushwood onbeyond. The trees did not seem strange, because no trees would haveseemed familiar. The brush did not impress him as exotic, because hisexperience with actual plants was restricted to the artificial plants ontelevision sets and the artificially arranged plants on rooftops. Hehardly let his eyes dwell on the vegetation at all. He searched formovement. He saw the moving furry rumps of half a dozen unknowncreatures as they dived into concealment as if they had been frightened. He looked down and could see the hull of the ship and two of the threetake-off fins on which it rested. 

The airlock door was opening out. It swung wide. It swung back againstthe hull. 

"Holden's making some sort of test of the air, " Cochrane said shortly. "The animals were scared when the outside door swung open. I'll see whathe finds out. "

He hurried down. He found Babs standing beside the inner door of theairlock. She looked somehow pale. There were two saucers of greenishsoup-like stuff on the floor at her feet. That would be, of course, thealgae from the air-purifying-system tanks. 

"The algae were alive, " said Babs. "Dr. Holden went in the lock to trythe air himself. He said he'd be very careful. "

For some obscure reason Cochrane felt ashamed. There was a long, adesperately long wait. Then sounds of machinery. The outer door closing. Small whistlings--compressed air. 

The inner door opened. Bill Holden came out of the lock, his expressionzestfully surprised. 

"Hello, Jed! I tried the air. It's all right! At a guess, maybe a littlehigh in oxygen. But it feels wonderfully good to breathe! And I canreport that the trees are wood and the green is chlorophyll, and thisis an Earth-type planet. That little smoky smell about is completelyfamiliar--and I'm taking that as an analysis. I'm going to take a walk. "

Cochrane found himself watching Babs' face. She looked enormouslyrelieved, but even Cochrane--who was looking for something of the sortwithout realizing it--could not read anything but relief in herexpression. She did not, for example, look admiring. 

"I'll borrow one of Johnny Simms' guns, " said Holden, "and take a lookaround. It's either perfectly safe or we're all dead anyhow. Frankly, Ithink it's safe. It feels right outside, Jed! It honestly feels right!"

"I'll come with you, " said Cochrane, "Jones and the pilot are necessaryif the ship's to get back to Earth. But we're expendable. "

He went back to the control-room. Johnny Simms zestfully undertook tooutfit them with arms. He made no proposal to accompany them. In twentyminutes or so, Cochrane and Holden went into the airlock and the doorclosed. A light came on automatically, precisely like the light in anelectric refrigerator. Cochrane found his lips twitching a little as theanalogy came to him. Seconds later the outer door opened, and they gazeddown among the branches of tall trees. Cochrane winced. There was norailing and the height bothered him. But Holden swung out the sling. Heand Cochrane descended, dangling, down fifty feet of unscarred, shining, metal hull. 

The ground was still hot underfoot. Holden cast off the sling and movedtoward cooler territory with an undignified haste. Cochrane followedhim. 

The smells were absolutely commonplace. Scorched wood. Smokiness. Therewere noises. Occasional cracklings from burned tree-trunks not whollyconsumed. High-pitched, shrill musical notes. And in and among thesmells there was an astonishing freshness in the feel of the air. Cochrane was especially apt to notice it because he had lived in a cityback on Earth, and had spent four days in the moon-rocket, and then hadbreathed the Lunar City air for eighteen days more and had just comefrom the space-ship whose air was distinctly of the canned variety. 

He did not notice the noise of the sling again in motion behind him. Hewas all eyes and ears and acute awareness of the completely strangeenvironment. He was the more conscious of a general strangeness becausehe was so completely an urban product. Yet he and Holden were vastlyless aware of the real strangeness about them than men of previousgenerations would have been. They did not notice the oddity of croakingsounds, like frogs, coming from the tree-tops. When they had threadedtheir way among leaning charred poles and came to green stuff underfootand merely toasted foliage all around, Cochrane heard a sweet, high-pitched trilling which came from a half-inch hole in the ground. But he was not astonished by the place from which the trilling came. Hewas astonished at the sound itself. 

There was a cry behind them. 

_"Mr. Cochrane! Doctor Holden!"_

They swung about. And there was Babs on the ground, just disentanglingherself from the sling. She had followed them out, after waiting untilthey had left the airlock and could not protest. 

Cochrane swore to himself. But when Babs joined them breathlessly, aftera hopping run over the hot ground, he said only:

"Fancy meeting you here!"

"_I--I couldn't resist it_, " said Babs in breathless apology. "And youdo have guns. It's safe enough--oh, look!"

She stared at a bush which was covered with pale purple flowers. Smallcreatures hovered in the air about it. She approached it and exclaimedagain at the sweetness of its scent. Cochrane and Holden joined her inadmiration. 

In a sense they were foolishly unwary. This was completely strangeterritory. It could have contained anything. Earlier explorers wouldhave approached every bush with caution and moved over every hilltopwith suspicion, anticipating deadly creatures, unparalleled monsters, and exotic and peculiar circumstances designed to entrap the unprepared. Earlier explorers, of course, would probably have had advice from famousmen to prepare them for all possible danger. 

But this was a valley between snow-clad mountains. The river that randown its length was fed by glaciers. This was a temperate climate. Thetrees were either coniferous or something similar, and the vegetationgrew well but not with the frenzy of a tropic region. There were fruitshere and there. Later, to be sure, they would prove to be mostlyastringent and unpalatable. They were broad-leafed, low-growing plantswhich would eventually turn out to be possessed of soft-fleshed rootswhich were almost unanimously useless for human purposes. There wereeven some plants with thorns and spines upon them. But they encounteredno danger. 

By and large, wild animals everywhere are ferocious only when desperate. No natural setting can permanently be so deadly that human being will beattacked immediately they appear. An area in which peril is continuousis one in which there is so much killing that there is no food-supplyleft to maintain its predators. On the whole, there is simply a limit tohow dangerous any place can be. Dangerous beasts have to be relativelyrare, or they will not have enough to eat, when they will thin out untilthey are relatively rare and do have enough to eat. 

So the three explorers moved safely, though their boldness was that ofignorance, below gigantic trees nearly as tall as the space-shipstanding on end. They saw a small furry biped, some twelve inches tall, which waddled insanely in the exact line of their progress and with noapparent hope of outdistancing them. They saw a gauzy creature withincredibly spindly legs. It flew from one tree-trunk to another, clinging to rough bark on each in turn. Once they came upon a smallanimal which looked at them with enormous, panic-stricken blue eyes andthen fled with a sinuous gait on legs so short that they seemed mereflippers. It dived into a hole and vanished. 

But they came out to clear space. They could look for miles and miles. There was a savannah of rolling soil which gradually sloped down to aswift-running river. The grass--if it was grass--was quite green, but ithad multitudes of tiny rose-colored flowers down the central rib of eachleaf. Nearby it seemed the color of Earth-grass, but it fadedimperceptibly into an incredible old-rose tint in the distance. Themountain-scarps on either side of the valley were sheer and tall. Therewas a great stony spur reaching out above the lowland, and there wasforest at its top and bare brown stone dropping two thousand feet sheer. And up the valley, where it narrowed, a waterfall leaped out from thecliff and dropped hundreds of feet in an arc of purest white, until itwas lost to view behind tree-tops. 

They looked. They stared. Cochrane was a television producer, and Holdenwas a psychiatrist, and Babs was a highly efficient secretary. They didnot make scientific observations. The ecological system of the valleyescaped their notice. They weren't qualified to observe that the flyingthings around seemed mostly to be furry instead of feathered, and thatinsects seemed few and huge and fragile, --and they did not notice thatmost of the plants appeared to be deciduous, so indicating that thisplanet had pronounced seasons. But Holden said:

"Up in Greenland there's a hospital on a cliff like that. People withdelusions of grandeur sometimes get cured just by looking at somethingthat's so much greater and more splendid than they are. I'd like to seea hospital up yonder!"

Babs said, shining-eyed:

"A city could be built in this valley. Not a tall city, with graystreets and gardens on the roofs. This could be a nice little city likepeople used to have. There would be little houses, all separate, andthere'd be grass all around and people could pluck flowers if theywanted to, to take inside. .. . There could be families here, andhomes--not living-quarters!"

Cochrane said nothing. He was envious of the others. They saw, and theydreamed according to their natures. Cochrane somehow felt forlorn. Presently he said depressedly:

"We'll go back to the ship. You can work out your woman's viewpointstuff with Bell, Babs. He'll write it, or you can give it to Alicia toput over when we go on the air. "

Babs made no reply. The absence of comment was almost pointed. Cochranerealized that she wouldn't do it, though he couldn't see why. 

They did go back to the ship. Cochrane sent Babs and Holden up thesling, first, while he waited down below. It was a singular sensation tostand there. He was the only human being afoot on a planet the size ofEarth or larger, at the foot of a cliff of metal which was thespace-ship's hull. He had a weapon in his hand, and it should defend himfrom anything. But he felt very lonely. 

The sling came down for him. He felt sick at heart as it lifted him. Hehad an overwhelming conviction of incompetence, though he could notdetail the reasons. The rope hauled him up, swaying, to the dizzy heightof the air-lock door. He could not feel elated. He was partlyresponsible for humankind's greatest achievement to date. But he had notquite the viewpoint that would let him enjoy its contemplation. 

The ground quivered very faintly as he rose. It was not an earthquake. It was merely a temblor, such as anyone would expect to feeloccasionally with six smoking volcanic cones in view. The green stuffall around was proof that it could be disregarded. 

CHAPTER SEVEN

In the United States, some two-hundred-odd light-years away, it happenedto be Tuesday. On this Tuesday, the broadcast from the stars wassponsored by Harvey's, the national men's clothing chain. Harvey'sadvertising department preferred discussion-type shows, becausedifferences of opinion in the shows proper led so neatly into theirtag-line. "You can disagree about anything but the quality of a Harveysuit! That's Superb!"

Therefore the broadcast after the landing of the ship on the volcanicplanet was partly commercial, and partly pictures and reports from theSpaceways expedition, and partly queries and comments by big-nameindividuals on Earth. Inevitably there was Dabney. And Dabney wasneurotic. 

He did his best to make a shambles of everything. 

The show started promptly enough at the beginning. There was atwo-minute film-strip of business-suited puppets marching row on row, indicating the enormous popularity of Harvey's suits. Then a fast minutehill-billy puppet-show about two feuding mountaineers who found theycouldn't possibly retain their enmity when they found themselves inagreement on the quality of Harvey suits. "That's Superb!" Thecommercial ended with a choral dance of madly enthusiastic miniaturefigures, dancing while they lustily sang the theme-song, "You candisagree, yes siree, you can disagree, About anything, indeedeverything, you and me, But you can't, no you can't disagree, About thestrictly super, extra super, Qualitee of a Har-ve-e-e-e suit! That'ssuperb!"

And thereupon the television audience of several continents saw thefaded-in image of mankind's first starship, poised upon its landing-finsamong trees more splendid than even television shows had ever picturedbefore. The camera panned slowly, and showed such open spaces as veryfew humans had ever seen unencumbered by buildings, and mountains of agrandeur difficult for most people to believe in. 

The scene cut to the space-ship's control-room and Al the pilot actedbriskly as the leader of an exploration-party just returned--though heactually hadn't left the ship. He introduced Jamison, wearing improvisedleggings and other trappings appropriate to an explorer in wilderness. Jamison began to extrapolate from his observations out the control-roomport, adding film-clips for authority. 

Smoothly and hypnotically, he pictured the valley as the ship descendedthe last few thousand feet, and told of the human colony to be foundedin this vast and hospitable area just explored. Mountainside hotels forstar-tourists would look down upon a scene of tranquility and cozyspaciousness. This would be the first human outpost in the stars. In theother valleys of this magnificent world there would be pasture-lands, and humankind would again begin to regard meat as a normal andnot-extravagant part of its diet--on this planet, certainly! There wereminerals beyond doubt, and water-power. The estimate was that at leastthe equivalent of the Asian continent had been made available for humanoccupation. And this splendid addition to the resources of humanity . .. 

The second commercial cut Jamison off. Naturally. The sponsor was payingfor time. So for Jamison was substituted the other fiction about thepoor young man who found himself envied by the board of directors of thefirm which employed him. His impeccable attire caused him to be promotedto vice-president without any question of whether or not he could fillthe job. Because, of course, he wore a Harvey suit. 

Alicia Keith showed herself on the screen and gave the woman's viewpointas written about by Bell. She talked pleasantly about how it felt tomove about on a planet never before trodden by human beings. She wasinterrupted by the pictured face of the lady editor of Joint Networks'feminine programs, who asked sweetly:

"Tell me, Alicia, what do you think the attainment of the stars willmean to the Average American housewife in the immediate future? Rightnow?"

Then Dabney came on. His appearance was fitted into the sequence fromLunar City, and his gestures were extravagant as anybody's gestures willbe where their hands and arms weigh so small a fraction ofEarth-normal. 

"I wish, " said Dabney impressively, "to congratulate the men who have soswiftly adapted my discovery of faster-than-light travel to practicaluse. I am overwhelmed at having been able to achieve a scientifictriumph which in time will mean that mankind's future stretchesendlessly and splendidly into the future!"

Here there was canned applause. Dabney held up his hand for attention. He thought. Visibly. 

"But, " he said urgently, "I admit that I am disturbed by theprecipitancy of the action that has been taken. I feel as if I were likesome powerful djinni giving gifts which the recipients may use withoutthought. "

More canned applause, inserted because he had given instructions for itwhenever he paused. The communicator-operator at Luna City took pleasurein following instructions exactly. Dabney held up his hand again. Againhe performed feats of meditation in plain view. 

"At the moment, " he said anxiously, "as the author of this trulymagnificent achievement, I have to use the same intellect which producedit, to examine the possibility of its ill-advised use. May notexplorers--who took off without my having examined their plans andprecautions--may not over-hasty users of my gift to humanity do harm?May they not find bacteria the human body cannot resist? May they notbring back plagues and epidemics? Have they prepared themselves to usemy discovery only for the benefit of mankind? Or have they beenprecipitous? I shall have to apply myself to the devising of methods bywhich my discovery--made so that Humanity might attain hithertoundreamed-of-heights--I shall have to devise means by which it will betruly a blessing to mankind!"

Dabney, of course, had tasted the limelight. All the world consideredhim the greatest scientist of all time--except, of course, the peoplewho knew something about science. But the first actual voyagers in spacehad become immediately greater heroes than himself. It was intolerableto Dabney to be restricted to taking bows on programs in which theystarred. So he wrote a star part for himself. 

The bearded biologist who followed him was to have lectured on thepictures and reports forwarded to him beforehand. But he could notignore so promising a lead to show how much he knew. So he lecturedauthoritatively on the danger of extra-terrestrial disease-producingorganisms being introduced on Earth. He painted a lurid picture, quotingfrom the history of pre-sanitation epidemics. He wound up with aspecific prophecy of something like the Black Death of the middle agesas lurking among the stars to decimate humanity. He was a victim of thewell-known authority-trauma which affects some people on television whenthey think millions of other people are listening to them. They departmadly from their scripts to try to say something startling enough tojustify all the attention they're getting. 

The broadcast ended with a sentimental live commercial in which adazzlingly beautiful girl melted into the arms of the worthy young manshe had previously scorned. She found him irresistible when she noticedthat he was wearing a suit she instantly knew by its quality could onlycome from Harvey's. 

On the planet of glaciers and volcanoes, Holden fumed. 

"Dammit!" he protested. "They talk like we're lepers! Like if we evercome back we'll be carriers of some monstrous disease that will wipe outthe human race! As a matter of fact, we're no more likely to catch anextra-terrestrial disease than to catch wry-neck from sick chickens!"

"That broadcast's nothing to worry about, " said Cochrane. 

"But it is!" insisted Holden. "Dabney and that fool biologist presentedspace-travel as a reason for panic! They could have every human being onEarth scared to death we'll bring back germs and everybody'll die of thecroup!"

Cochrane grinned. 

"Good publicity--if we needed it! Actually, they've boosted the show. From now on every presentation has a dramatic kick it didn't havebefore. Now everybody will feel suspense waiting for the next show. HasJamison got the Purple Death on the Planet of Smoky Hilltops? Willdarling Alicia Keith break out in green spots next time we watch her onthe air? Has Captain Al of the star-roving space-ship breathed in sporesof the Swelling Fungus? Are the space-travellers doomed? Tune in on ournext broadcast and see! My dear Bill, if we weren't signed up forsponsors' fees, I'd raise our prices after this trick!"

Holden looked unconvinced. Cochrane said kindly:

"Don't worry! I could turn off the panic tomorrow--as much panic asthere is. Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe had a proposal they setgreat store by. They wanted to parcel out a big contest for a name formankind's second planet. They had regional sponsors lined up. It wouldhave been worldwide! Advertisers were drooling over the prospect ofpeople proposing names for this planet on box-tops! They were planningfive million prize-money--and who'd be afraid of us then? But I turnedit down because we haven't got a helicopter. We couldn't stage enoughdifferent shows from this planet to keep it going the minimum six weeksfor a contest like that. Instead, we're taking off in a couple of hours. Jones agrees. The astronomers back home have picked out another Sol-typestar that ought to have planets. We're going to run over and see whatpickings we can find. Not too far--only twenty-some light-years!"

He regarded Holden quizzically to see how the last phases affected him. Holden didn't notice it. 

"A contest--It doesn't make sense!"

"I know it isn't sense!" said Cochrane. "It's public-relations! I'mbeginning to get my self-respect back. I see now that aspace-exploration job is only as good as its public-relations man!"

He went zestfully to find Babs to tell her to leave the communicator-setand let queries go unanswered as a matter of simple business policy. 

The sling which swung out of the airlock now became busy. They hadlanded on this planet, and they were going to leave it, and there hadbeen a minimum of actual contact with its soil. So Jamison took hisleggings--put on for the show--and he and Bell went down to the groundand foraged through the woods. Jamison carried one of Johnny Simms'guns, which he regarded with acute suspicion, and Bell carried cameras. They photographed trees and underbrush, first as atmosphere and thenwith fanatic attention to leaves and fruits or flowers. Bell gotpictures of one of the small, furry bipeds that Cochrane and Holden hadspied when Babs was with them. He got a picture of what he believed tobe a spider-web--it was thicker and heavier and huger than any web onEarth--and rather fearfully looked for the monster that could stringthirty-foot cables as thick as fishing-twine. Then he found that it wasnot a snare at all. It was a construction at whose center somethingundiscoverable had made a nest, with eggs in it. Some creature had madean unapproachable home for itself where its young would not be assailedby predators. 

Al, the pilot, went out of the lock and descended to the ground and wentas far as the edge of the ash-ring. But he did not go any farther. Hewandered about unhappily, pretending that he did not want to go into thewoods. He tried to appear quite content to view half-burnt trees for hisexperience of the first extra-terrestrial planet on which men hadlanded. He did kick up some pebbles--water-rounded--and one of them hadflecks of what looked like gold in it. Al regarded it excitedly, andthen thought of freight-rates. But he did scrabble for more. Presentlyhe had a pocket-full of small stones which would be regarded withrapture by his nieces and nephews because they had come from the stars. Actually, they were quite commonplace minerals. The flecks of whatlooked like gold were only iron pyrates. 

Jones did not leave the ship. He was puttering. Nor Alicia. Holden urgedher to take a walk, and she said quietly:

"Johnny's out with a gun. He's hunting. I don't like to be with Johnnywhen he may be disappointed. "

She smiled, and Holden sourly went away. There had been no particularconsequences of Johnny Simms' inability to remember what was right andwhat was wrong. But Holden felt like a normal man about men whose wiveslook patient. Even psychiatrists feel that it is somehow disreputable toilltreat a woman who doesn't fight back. This attitude is instinctive. It is what is called the fine, deep-rooted impulse to chivalry which isone of the prides of modern culture. 

Holden settled dourly down at the communicator to get an outgoing callto Earth, when there were some hundreds of incoming calls backed up. Bysheer obstinacy and bad manners he made it. He got a connection to ahospital where he was known, and he talked to its bacteriologist. Thebacteriologist was competent, but not yet famous. With Holden givinghonest guesses at the color of the sunlight, and its probableultra-violet content, and with careful estimates of the exactness withwhich burning vegetation here smelled like Earth-plants, they arrived atimprecise but common sense conclusions. Of the hundreds of thousands ofpossible organic compounds, only so many actually took part in thelife-processes of creatures on Earth. Yet there were hundreds ofthousands of species prepared to make use of anything usable. If thesunlight and temperature of the two worlds were similar, it was somewhatmore than likely that the same chemical compounds would be used byliving things on both. So that there could be micro-organisms on thenew planet which could be harmful. But on the other hand, either theywould be familiar in the toxins they produced--and human bodies couldresist them--or else they would be new compounds to which humans wouldreact allergically. Basically, then, if anybody on the ship developedhives, they had reason to be frightened. But so long as nobody sneezedor broke out in welts, their lives were probably safe. 

This comforting conclusion took a long time to work out. Meanwhile Babsand Cochrane had swung down to the ground and went hiking. Cochrane wasarmed as before, though he had no experience as a marksman. Intelevision shows he had directed the firing of weapons shooting blankcharges--cut to a minimum so they wouldn't blast the mikes. He knew whatmotions to go through, but nothing else. 

They did not explore in the same direction as their first excursion. Theship was to take off presently, as soon as this planet had turned enoughfor the space-ship's nose to point nearly in the direction of their nexttarget. They had two hours for exploration. 

They came upon something which lay still across their path, like a greatserpent. Cochrane looked at it startledly. Then he saw that the round, glistening seeming snake was fastened to the ground by rootlets. It wasa plant which grew like a creeper, absorbing nourishment from a vastroot-area. Somewhere, no doubt, it would rear upward and spread outleaves to absorb the sun's light. It used, in a way, the principle ofthose lateral wells which in dry climates gather water too scarce tocollect in merely vertical holes. 

They went on and on, admiring and amazed. All about them werecuriosities of adaptation, freaks of ecological adjustment, marvels ofsymbiotic cooperation. A botanist would have swooned with joy at thematerial all about. A biologist would have babbled happily. Babs andCochrane admired without information. They walked interestedly butunawed among the unparalleled. Back on Earth they knew as much as mostpeople about nature--practically nothing at all. Babs had never seen anywild plants before. She was fascinated by what she saw, and exclaimed ateverything. But she did not realize a fraction of the marvels on whichher eyes rested. On the whole, she survived. 

"It's a pity we haven't got a helicopter, " Cochrane said regretfully. "If we could fly around from place to place, and send back pictures . .. We can't do it in the ship . .. It would burn more fuel than we've got. "

Babs wrinkled her forehead. 

"Doctor Holden's badly worried because we can't make as alluring apicture as he'd like. "

Cochrane halted, to watch something which was flat like a disk ofgray-green flesh and which moved slowly out of their path withdisquieting writhing motions. It vanished, and he said:

"Yes. Bill's an honest man, even if he is a psychiatrist. He wantsdesperately to do something for the poor devils back home who're sopitifully frustrated. There are tens of millions of men who can't hopefor anything better than to keep the food and shelter supply intact forthemselves and their families. They can't even pretend to hope for morethan that. There isn't more than so much to go around. But Bill wants togive them hope. He figures that without hope the world will turnmadhouse in another generation. It will. "

"You're trying to do something about that!" said Babs quickly. "Don'tyou think you're offering hope to everybody back on Earth?"

"No!" snapped Cochrane. "I'm not trying anything so abstract asfurnishing hope to a frustrated humanity! Nobody can supply anabstraction! Nobody can accomplish an abstraction! Everything that'sactually done is specific and real! Maybe you can find abstractqualities in it after it's done, but I'm a practical man! I'm not tryingto produce an improved psychological climate, suitable for debilitatedpsychos! I'm trying to get a job done!"

"I've wondered, " admitted Babs, "what the job is. "

Cochrane grimaced. 

"You wouldn't believe it, Babs. "

There was an odd quivering underfoot. Trees shook. There was no otherpeculiarity anywhere. Nothing fell. No rocks rolled. In a valley amongvolcanoes, where the smoke from no less than six cones could be seen atonce, temblors would not do damage. What damage mild shakings could dowould have been done centuries since. 

Babs said uneasily:

"That feels--queer, doesn't it?"

Cochrane nodded. But just as he and Babs had never been conditioned tobe afraid of animals, they had been conditioned by air-travel at homeand space-travel to here against alarm at movements of theirsurroundings. Temblors were evidently frequent at this place. Trees wereanchored against them as against prevailing winds in exposed situations. Landslides did not remain poised to fall. Really unstable slopes hadbeen shaken down long ago. 

"I wish we had a helicopter, " Cochrane repeated. "The look of themountains as we came down, with glaciers between the smoking cones--thatwas good show-stuff! We could have held interest here until we workedthat naming contest. We could use the extra capital that would bring in!As it is, we've got to move on with practically nothing accomplished. The trouble is that I didn't think we would succeed as we have! Heavenknows I could have gotten helicopters!"

He helped her up a small steep incline, where rock protruded from ahillside. 

The ground trembled again. Not alarmingly, but Babs' hold of his handtightened a little. They continued to climb. They came out atop a smallbare prominence which rose above the forest. Here they could see overthe treetops in a truly extensive view. The mountains all about wereclearly visible. Some were ten and some twenty miles away. Some, stillfarther, were barely visible in the thin haze of distance. But there wasa thick pall of smoke hovering about one of the farthest. It wasmushroom-shaped. At one time in human history, it would have seemedtypically a volcanic cloud. To Cochrane and Babs, it was typically thecloud of an atomic explosion. 

The ground shook sharply underfoot. Babs staggered. 

Flying things rose from the forests in swarms. They hovered and dartedand flapped above the tree-tops. Temblors did not alarm the creatures ofthe valley. But ground-shocks like this last were another matter. 

A great tree, rearing above its fellows, toppled slowly. With ripping, tearing noises, it bent sedately toward the smoking, far-away mountain. It crashed thunderously down upon smaller trees. There were otherrending noises. The flying things rose higher, seeming agitated. Echoessounded in the ears of the two atop the hill. 

There was another sharp shock. Babs gave a little, inarticulate cry. Shepointed. 

There was much smoke in the distance. Over the far-away cone, which wasindistinct in the smoke of its own making--over the edge of the distantmountains a glare appeared. It was a thin line of bright white light. With infinite deliberation it began to creep down the slanting, blessedly remote mountainside. 

The ground seemed to shift abruptly, and then shift back. Across anddown the valley, five miles away, a portion of the stony wall detacheditself and slid downward in seeming slow motion. Two more great treesmade ripping sounds. One crashed. There was an enormous darkness aboveone part of the sky. Its under side glowed from fires as of hell, in thecrater beneath it. There were sparkings above the mountaintop. 

Very oddly indeed, the sky overhead was peacefully blue. But at thehorizon a sheet of fire rolled down mile-long slopes. It seemed to movewith infinite deliberation, but to move visibly at such a distance itmust have been traveling like an express-train. It must have beenunthinkably hot, glaring-white molten stone, thin as water, pouringdownward in a flood of fire. 

There was no longer a sensation of the ground trembling underfoot. Nowthe noticeable sensation was when the ground was still. Temblors werepractically continuous. There were distinct sharp impacts, as of violentblows nearby. 

Babs stared, fascinated. She glanced up at Cochrane. His skin was white. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. 

"We're safe here, aren't we?" she asked, scared. 

"I think so. But I'm not going to take you through falling trees whilethis is going on! There's another tree down! I'm worrying about theship! If it topples--. "

She looked at the nose of the space-ship, gleaming silver metal, risingfrom the trees about the landing-spot it had burned clear. A third ofits length was visible. 

"If it topples, " said Cochrane, "we'll never be able to take off. It hasto point up to lift. "

Babs looked from the ship to him, and back again. Then her eyes wentfearfully to the remote mountain. Rumblings came from it now. They werenot loud. They were hardly more than dull growlings, at the lower limitof audible pitch. They were like faint and distant thunder. There wereflashings like lightning in the cloud which now enveloped the mountain'stop. 

Cochrane made an indescribable small sound. He stared at the ship. Asexplosion-waves passed over the ground, a faint, unanimous movement ofthe treetops became visible. It seemed to Cochrane that the space-shipwavered as if about to fall from its upright position. 

It was not designed to stand such violence as a fall would imply. Itshull would be dented or rent. It was at least possible that itsfuel-store would detonate. But even if its fall were checked bystill-standing trees about it, it could never take off again. The eighthumans of its company could never juggle it back to a vertical position. Rocket-thrust would merely push it in the direction its nose pointed. Toppled, its rocket-thrust would merely shove it blindly over stones andtrees and to destruction. 

The ship swayed again. Visibly. Ground-waves made its weight have theeffect of blows. Part of its foundation rested on almost-visible stone, only feet below the ground-level. But one of the landing-fins rested onhumus. As the shocks passed, that fin-foot sank into the soft soil. Thespace-ship leaned perceptibly. 

Flying creatures darted back and forth above the tree-tops. Miles away, insensate violence reigned. Clouds of dust and smoke shot miles into theair, and half a mountainside glowed white-hot, and there was the soundof long-continued thunder, and the ground shook and quivered. .. . 

There were movements nearby. A creature with yellow fur and the shape ofa bear with huge ears came padding out of the forest. It swarmed up thebare stone of the hill on which Babs and Cochrane stood. 

It ignored them. Halfway up the unwooded part of the hill, it stoppedand made plaintive, high-pitched noises. Other creatures came. Many hadcome while the man and girl were too absorbed to notice. Now two more ofthe large animals came out into the open and climbed the hill. 

Babs said shakily:

"Do you--think they'll--do you think--"

There was a nearer roaring. The space-ship leaned, and leaned. .. . Cochrane's lips tensed. 

The space-ship's rockets bellowed and a storm of hurtling smoke flashedup around it. It lifted, staggering as its steering-jets triedfrantically to swing its lower parts underneath its mass. It lurchedviolently, and the rockets flamed terribly. It lifted again. Its tailwas higher than the trees, but it did not point straight up. It surgedhorribly across the top of the forest, leaving a vast flash of flamingvegetation behind it. Then it steadied, and aimed skyward andclimbed. .. . 

Then it was not. Obviously the Dabney field booster had been flashed onto get the ship out to space. The ship had vanished into emptiness. 

The Dabney field had flicked it some hundred and seventy-odd light-yearsfrom Earth's moon in the flicker of a heart-beat. It might have gonethat far again. Whoever was in it had had no choice but to take off, andno way to take off without suicidal use of fuel in any other way. 

Cochrane looked at where the ship had vanished. Seconds passed. Therecame the thunderclap of air closing the vacuum the ship's disappearancehad left. 

There were squealings behind the pair on the hilltop. Eight of the hugeyellow beasts were out in the open, now. Tiny, furry biped animalswaddled desperately to get out of their way. Smaller creatures scuttledhere and there. A sinuous creature with fur but no apparent legs writhedits way upward. But all the creatures were frightened. They observed anabsolute truce, under the overmastering greater fear of nature. 

Far away, the volcano on the skyline boomed and flashed and emittedmonstrous clouds of smoke. The shining, incandescent lava on its flanksglared across the glaciers. 

Babs gasped suddenly. She realized the situation in which she andCochrane had been left. 

Shivering, she pressed close to him as the distant black smoke-cloudspread toward the center of the sky. 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Before sunset, they reached the area of ashes where the ship had stood. Cochrane was sure that if anybody else had been left behind besidesthemselves, the landing-place was an inevitable rendezvous. Only threemembers of the ship's company had been inside when Babs and Cochraneleft to stroll for the two hours astronomers on Earth had set as awaiting-period. Jones had been in the ship, and Holden, and AliciaSimms. Everybody else had been exploring. Their attitude had beenexactly that of sight-seers and tourists. But they could have gottenback before the take-off. 

Apparently they had. Nobody seemed to have returned to the burned-overspace since the ship's departure. The blast of the rockets had erasedall previous tracks, but still there was a thin layer of ash resettledover the clearing. Footprints would have been visible in it. Anybodyremaining would have come here. Nobody had. Babs and Cochrane were leftalone. 

There were still temblors, but the sharper shocks no longer came. Therewas conflagration in the wood, where the lurching ship had left a longfresh streak of forest-fire. The two castaways stared at the round, empty landing-place. Overhead, the blue sky turned yellow--but where thesmoke from the eruption rose, the sky early became a brownish red--andpresently the yellow faded to gold. Unburned green foliage all about wassingularly beautiful in that golden glow. But it was more beautifulstill as the sky turned rose-pink and then carmine in turn, and thencrimson from one horizon to the other save where the volcanicsmoke-cloud marred the color. Then the east darkened, and became a redso deep as to be practically black, and unfamiliar bright stars began topeep through it. 

Before darkness was complete, Cochrane dragged burning branches from theedge of the new fire--the heat was searing--and built a new and smallerfire in the place where the ship had been. 

"This isn't for warmth, " he explained briefly, "but so we'll have lightif we need it. And it isn't likely that animals will be anything butafraid of it. "

He went off to drag charred masses of burnable stuff from the burned-outfirst forest fire. He built a sort of rampart in the very center of theclearing. He brought great heaps of scorched wood. He did not know howmuch was needed to keep the fire going until dawn. 

When he finished, Babs was silently at work trying to find out how tokeep the fire going. The burning parts had to be kept together. Onebranch, burning alone, died out. Two red-hot brands in contact kept eachother alight. 

"I'm sorry we haven't anything to eat, " Cochrane told her. 

"I'm not hungry, " she assured him. "What are we going to do now?"

"There's nothing to do until morning. " Unconsciously, Cochrane lookedgrim. "Then there'll be plenty. Food, for one thing. We don't know, actually, whether or not there's anything really edible on thisplanet--for us. It could be that there are fruits or possibly stalks orleaves that would be nourishing. Only--we don't know which is which. Wehave to be careful. We might pick something like poison ivy!"

Babs said:

"But the ship will come back!"

"Of course, " agreed Cochrane. "But it may take them some time to findus. This is a pretty big planet, you know. "

He estimated his supply of burnable stuff. He improved the rampart hehad made at first. Babs stared at him. After four or five minutes hestepped back. 

"You can lean against this, " he explained. "You can watch the fire quitecomfortably. And it's a sort of wall. The fire will light one side ofyou and the wall will feel comforting behind you when you get sleepy. "

Babs nodded. She swallowed. 

"I--think I see what you mean when you say they may have trouble findingus, because this planet is so large. "

Cochrane nodded reluctantly. 

"Of course there's this burned-off space for a marker, " he observedcheerfully. "But it could take several days for them to see it. "

Babs swallowed again. She said carefully:

"The--ship can't hover like a helicopter, to search. You said so. Itdoesn't have fuel enough. They can't really search for us at all! Theonly way to make a real search would be to go back to Earth and--bringback helicopters and fuel for them and men to fly them. .. . Isn't thatright?"

"Not necessarily. But we do have to figure on a matter of--well--two orthree days as a possibility. "

Babs moistened her lips and he said quickly:

"I did a show once about some miners lost in a wilderness. A periodshow. In it, they knew that part of their food was poisoned. They didn'tknow what. They had to have all their food. And of course they didn'thave laboratories with which to test for poison. "

Babs eyed him oddly. 

"They bandaged their arms, " said Cochrane, "and put scraps of thedifferent foodstuffs under the bandages. The one that was poisonousshowed. It affected the skin. Like an allergy-test. I'll try that trickin the morning when there's light to pick samples by. There are berriesand stuff. There must be fruits. A few hours should test them. "

Babs said without intonation:

"And we can watch what the animals eat. "

Cochrane nodded gravely. Animals on Earth can live on things that--toput it mildly--humans do not find satisfying. Grass, for example. But itwas good for Babs to think of cheering things right now. There would beplenty of discouragement to contemplate later. 

There was a flicker of brightness in the sky. Presently the earthquivered. Something made a plaintive, "_waa-waa-waaaaa!_" sound off inthe night. Something else made a noise like the tinkling of bells. Therewas an abstracted hooting presently, which now was nearby and now wasfar away, and once they heard something which was exactly like the noiseof water running into a pool. But the source of that particular burblingmoved through the dark wood beyond the clearing. 

It was not wholly dark where they were, even aside from their own smallfire. The burning trees in the departing ship's rocket-trail sent up acolumn of white which remaining flames illuminated. The remarkablyprimitive camp Cochrane had made looked like a camp on a tinysnow-field, because of the ashes. 

"We've got to think about shelter, " said Babs presently, very quietlyindeed. "If there are glaciers, there must be winter here. If there iswinter, we have to find out which animals we can eat, and how to storethem. "

"Hold on!" protested Cochrane. "That's looking too far ahead!"

Babs clasped her hands together. It could have been to keep theirtrembling from being seen. Cochrane was regarding her face. She keptthat under admirable control. 

"Is it?" asked Babs. "On the broadcast Mr. Jamison said that there wasas much land here as on all the continent of Asia. Maybe he exaggerated. Say there's only as much land not ice-covered as there is in SouthAmerica. It's all forest and plain and--uninhabited. " She moistened herlips, but her voice was very steady. "If all of South America wasuninhabited, and there were two people lost in it, and nobody knew wherethey were--how long would it take to find them?"

"It would be a matter of luck, " admitted Cochrane. 

"If the ship comes back, it can't hover to look for us. There isn't fuelenough. It couldn't spot us from space if it went in an orbit like aspace platform. By the time they could get help--they wouldn't even besure we were alive. If we can't count on being found right away, thisburned-over place will be green again. In two or three weeks theycouldn't find it anyhow. "

Cochrane fidgeted. He had worked out all this for himself. He'd beendisturbed at having to tell it, or even admit it to Babs. Now she saidin a constrained voice:

"If men came to this planet and built a city and hunted for us, it mightstill be a hundred years before anybody happened to come into thisvalley. Looking for us would be worse than looking for a needle in ahaystack. I don't think we're going to be found again. "

Cochrane was silent. He felt guiltily relieved that he did not have tobreak this news to Babs. Most men have an instinctive feeling that awoman will blame them for bad news they hear. 

A long time later, Babs said as quietly as before:

"Johnny Simms asked me to come along while he went hunting. I didn't. Atleast I--I'm not cast away with him!"

Cochrane said gruffly:

"Don't sit there and brood! Try to get some sleep. "

She nodded. After a long while, her head drooped. She jerked awakeagain. Cochrane ordered her vexedly to make herself comfortable. Shestretched out beside the wall of wood that Cochrane had made. She saidquietly:

"While we're looking for food tomorrow morning, we'd better keep oureyes open for a place to build a house. "

She closed her eyes. 

Cochrane kept watch through the dark hours. He heard night-cries in theforest, and once toward dawn the distant volcano seemed to undergo afresh paroxysm of activity. Boomings and explosions rumbled in thenight. There were flickerings in the sky. But there were fewer temblorsafter it, and no shocks at all. 

More than once, Cochrane found himself dozing. It was difficult to stayin a state of alarm. There was but one single outcry in the forest thatsounded like the shriek of a creature seized by a carnivore. That wasnot nearby. He tried to make plans. He felt bitterly self-reproachfulthat he knew so few of the things that would be useful to a castaway. But he had been a city man all his life. Woodcraft was not only out ofhis experience--on overcrowded Earth it would have been completelyuseless. 

From time to time he found himself thinking, instead of practicalmatters, of the astonishing sturdiness of spirit Babs displayed. 

When she waked, well after daybreak, and sat up blinking, he said:

"Er--Babs. We're in this together. From now on, if you want to tell mesomething for my own good, go ahead! Right?"

She rubbed her eyes on her knuckles and said, "I'd have done that anyhow. For both our good. Don't you think we'dbetter try to find a place where we can get a drink of water? Water hasto be right to drink!"

They set off, Cochrane carrying the weapon he'd brought from the ship. It was Babs who pointed out that a stream should almost certainly befound where rain would descend, downhill. Babs, too, spotted one of thesmall, foot-high furry bipeds feasting gluttonously on small roundobjects that grew from the base of a small tree instead of on itsbranches. The tree, evidently, depended on four-footed rather than onflying creatures to scatter its seeds. They gathered samples of thefruit. Cochrane peeled a sliver of the meat from one of the roundobjects and put it under his watchstrap. 

They found a stream. They found other fruits, and Cochrane prepared thesame test for them as for the first. One of the samples turned his skinred and angry almost immediately. He discarded it and all the fruits ofthe kind from which it came. 

At midday they tasted the first-gathered fruit. The flesh was red andjuicy. There was a texture it was satisfying to chew on. The taste wasindeterminate save for a very mild flavor of maple and peppermint mixedtogether. 

They had no symptoms of distress afterward. Other fruits were lesssatisfactory. Of the samples which the skin-test said werenon-poisonous, one was acrid and astringent, and two others had no tasteexcept that of greenness--practically the taste of any leaf one mightchew. 

"I suppose, " said Cochrane wryly, as they headed back toward theash-clearing at nightfall, "we've got to find out if the animals can beeaten. "

Babs nodded matter-of-factly. 

"Yes. Tonight I'm taking part of the watch. As you remarked thismorning, we're in this together. "

He looked at her sharply, and she flushed. 

"I mean it!" she said doggedly. "I'm watching part of the night!"

He was desperately tired. His muscles were not yet back to normal afterthe low gravity on the moon. She'd had more rest than he. He had to lether help. But there was embarrassment between them because it looked asif they would have to spend the rest of their lives together, and theyhad not made the decision. It had been made for them. And they had notacknowledged it yet. 

When they reached the clearing, Cochrane began to drag new logs towardthe central place where much of last night's supply of fuel remained. Matter-of-factly, Babs began to haul stuff with him. He said vexedly:

"Quit it! I've already been realizing how little I know about the thingswe're going to need to survive! Let me fool myself about masculinestrength, anyhow!"

She smiled at him, a very little. But she went obediently to the fire toexperiment with cookery of the one palatable variety of fruit from thisplanet's trees. He drove himself to bring more wood than before. When hesettled down she said absorbedly:

"Try this, Jed. "

Then she flushed hotly because she'd inadvertently used his familiarname. But she extended something that was toasted and not too muchburned. He ate, with weariness sweeping over him like a wave. The cookedfruit was almost a normal food, but it did need salt. There would betrouble finding salt on this planet. The water that should be in theseas was frozen in the glaciers. Salt would not have been leached out ofthe soil and gathered in the seas. It would be a serious problem. ButCochrane was very tired indeed. 

"I'll take the first two hours, " said Babs briskly. "Then I'll wakeyou. "

He showed her how to use the weapon. He meant to let himself driftquietly off to sleep, acting as if he had a little trouble going off. But he didn't. He lay down, and the next thing he knew Babs was shakinghim violently. In the first dazed instant when he opened his eyes hethought they were surrounded by forest fire. But it wasn't that. It wasdawn, and Babs had let him sleep the whole night through, and the skywas golden-yellow from one horizon to the other. More, he heard thenow-familiar cries of creatures in the forest. But also he heard aroaring sound, very thin and far away, which could only be one thing. 

"Jed! Jed! Get up! Quick! The ship's coming back! The ship! We've got tomove!"

She dragged him to his feet. He was suddenly wide-awake. He ran withher. He flung back his head and stared up as he ran. There was apin-point of flame and vapor almost directly overhead. It grew swiftlyin size. It plunged downward. 

They reached the surrounding forest and plunged into it. Babs stumbled, and Cochrane caught her, and they ran onward hand in hand to get clearaway from the down-blast of the rockets. The rocket-roaring grew louderand louder. 

The castaways gazed. It was the ship. From below, fierce flames poureddown, blue-white and raging. The silver hull slanted a little. Itshifted its line of descent. It came down with a peculiar deftness ofhandling that Cochrane had not realized before. Its rockets splashed, but the flame did not extend out to the edge of the clearing that hadbeen burned off at first. The rocket-flames, indeed, did not approachthe proportion to be seen on rockets on film-tape, or as Cochrane hadseen below the moon-rocket descending on Earth. 

The ship settled within yards of its original landing-place. Its rocketsdwindled, but remained burning. They dwindled again. The noise wasoutrageous, but still not the intolerable tumult of a moon-rocketlanding on Earth. 

The rockets cut off. 

The airlock door opened. Cochrane and Babs waved cheerfully from theedge of the clearing. Holden appeared in the door and shouted down:

"Sorry to be so long coming back. "

He waved and vanished. They had, of course, to wait until the ground atleast partly cooled before the landing-sling could be used. Around themthe noises of the forest continued. There were cooling, crackling soundsfrom the ship. 

"I wonder how they found their way back!" said Babs. "I didn't thinkthey ever could. Did you?"

"Babs, " said Cochrane, "you lied to me! You said you'd wake me in twohours. But you let me sleep all night!"

"You'd let me sleep the night before, " she told him composedly. "I wasfresher than you were, and today'd have been a pretty bad one. We weregoing to try to kill some animals. You needed the rest. "

Cochrane said slowly:

"I found out something, Babs. Why you could face things. Why we humanshaven't all gone mad. I think I've gotten the woman's viewpoint now, Babs. I like it. "

She inspected the looming blister-ports of the ship, now waiting for theground to cool so they could come aboard. 

"I think we'd have made out if the ship hadn't come, " Cochrane told her. "We'd have had a woman's viewpoint to work from. Yours. You looked aheadto building a house. Of course you thought of finding food, but you werethinking of the possibility of winter and--building a house. You weren'tthinking only of survival. You were thinking far ahead. Women must thinkfarther ahead than men do!"

Babs looked at him briefly, and then returned to her apparently absorbedcontemplation of the ship. 

"That's what's the matter with people back on Earth, " Cochrane saidurgently. "There's no frustration as long as women can look ahead--farahead, past here and now! When women can do that, they can keep mengoing. It's when there's nothing to plan for that men can't go onbecause women can't hope. You see? You saw a city here. A little city, with separate homes. On Earth, too many people can't think of more thanliving-quarters and keeping food enough for them--them only!--coming in. They can't hope for more. And it's when that happens--You see?"

Babs did not answer. Cochrane fumbled. He said angrily:

"Confound it, can't you see what I'm trying to say? We'd have beenbetter off, as castaways, than back on Earth crowded and scared of ourjobs! I'm saying I'd rather stay here with you than go back to the way Iwas living before we started off on this voyage! I think the two of uscould make out under any circumstances! I don't want to try to make outwithout you! It isn't sense!" Then he scowled helplessly. "Dammit, I'vestaged plenty of shows in which a man asked a girl to marry him, andthey were all phoney. It's different, now that _I_ mean it! What's agood way to ask you to marry me?"

Babs looked momentarily up into his face. She smiled ever so faintly. 

"They're watching us from the ports, " she said. "If you want myviewpoint--If we were to wave to them that we'll be right back, we canget some more of those fruits I cooked. It might be interesting to havesome to show them. "

He scowled more deeply than before. 

"I'm sorry you feel that way. But if that's it--"

"And on the way, " said Babs. "When they're not watching, you might kissme. "

They had a considerable pile of the red-fleshed fruits ready when theground had cooled enough for them to reach the landing-sling. 

Once aboard the ship, Cochrane headed for the control-room, with Jamisonand Bell tagging after him. Bell had an argument. 

"But the volcano's calmed down--there's only a wall of steam where thelava hit the glaciers--and we could fix up a story in a couple of hours!I've got background shots! You and Babs could make the story-scenes andwe'd have a castaway story! Perfect! The first true castaway story fromthe stars--. You know what that would mean!"

Cochrane snarled at him. 

"Try it and I'll tear you limb from limb! I've put enough of otherpeople's private lives on the screen! My own stays off! I'm not going tohave even a phoney screen-show built around Babs and me for people togabble about!"

Bell said in an injured tone:

"I'm only trying to do a good job! I started off on this business as awriter. I haven't had a real chance to show what I can do with this sortof material!"

"Forget it!" Cochrane snapped again. "Stick to your cameras!"

Jamison said hopefully:

"You'll give me some data on plants and animals, Mr. Cochrane? Won'tyou? I'm doing a book with Bell's pictures, and--"

"Let me alone!" raged Cochrane. 

He reached the control-room. Al, the pilot, sat at the controls with anair of special alertness. 

"You're all right? For our lined up trip, we ought to leave in abouttwenty minutes. We'll be pointing just about right then. "

"I'm all right, " said Cochrane. "And you can take off when you please. "To Jones he said: "How'd you find us? I didn't think it could be done. "

"Doctor Holden figured it out, " said Jones. "Simple enough, but I waslost! When the ground-shocks came, everybody else ran to the ship. Wewaited for you. You didn't come. " It had been, of course, becauseCochrane would not risk taking Babs through a forest in which trees werefalling. "We finally had to choose between taking off and crashing. Sowe took off. "

"That was quite right. We'd all be messed up if you hadn't, " Cochranetold him. 

Jones waved his hands. 

"I didn't think we could ever find you again. We were sixty light-yearsaway when that booster effect died out. Then Doctor Holden got on thecommunicator. He got Earth. The astronomers back there located us andgave us the line to get back by. We found the planet. Even then I didn'tsee how we'd pick out the valley. But Doc had had 'em checking the shotswe transmitted as we were making our landing. We had the whole firstapproach on film-tape. They put a crowd of map-comparators to work. Wewent in a Space Platform orbit around the planet, transmitting what wesaw from out there--they figured the orbit for us, too--and they checkedwhat we transmitted against what we'd photographed going down. So theywere able to spot the exact valley and tell us where to come down. Weactually spotted this valley last night, but we couldn't land in thedark. "

Cochrane felt abashed. 

"I couldn't have done that job, " he admitted, "so I didn't think anybodycould. Hm. Didn't all this cost a lot of fuel?"

Jones actually smiled. 

"I worked out something. We don't use as much fuel as we did. We'reprobably using too much now. Al--go ahead and lift. I want to check whatthe new stuff does, anyhow. Take off!"

The pilot threw a switch, and Jones threw another, a newly installedone, just added to his improvised control-column. A light glowedbrightly. Al pressed one button, very gently. A roaring set up outside. The ship started up. There was practically no feeling of acceleration, this time. The ship rose lightly. Even the rocket-roar was mild indeed, compared to its take-off from Luna and the sound of its first landing onthe planet just below. 

Cochrane saw the valley floors recede, and mountain-walls drop below. From all directions, then, vegetation-filled valleys flowed toward theship, and underneath. Glaciers appeared, and volcanic cones, and thenenormous stretches of white, with smoking dots here and there upon it. In seconds, it seemed, the horizon was visibly curved. In other secondsthe planet being left behind was a monstrous white ball, and there werepatches of intolerable white sunlight coming in the ports. 

And Cochrane felt queer. Jones had given the order for take-off. Joneshad determined to leave at this moment, because Jones had tests hewanted to make. .. . Cochrane felt like a passenger. From the man whodecided things because he was the one who knew what had to be done, hehad become something else. He had been absent two nights and part of aday, and decisions had been made in which he had no part--

It felt queer. It felt even startling. 

"We're in a modification of the modified Dabney field now, " observedJones in a gratified tone. "You know the original theory. "

"I don't, " acknowledged Cochrane. 

"The field's always a pipe, a tube, a column of stressed space betweenthe field-plates, " Jones reminded him. "When we landed the first time, back yonder, the tail of the ship wasn't in the field at all. The fieldstretched from the bow of the ship only, out to that last balloon wedropped. We were letting down at an angle to that line. It was like akite and a string and the kite's tail. The string was the Dabney field, and the directions we were heading was the kite's tail. "

Cochrane nodded. It occurred to him that Jones was very much unlikeDabney. Jones had discovered the Dabney field, but having sold thefame-rights to it, he now apparently thought "Dabney Field" was theproper technical term for his own discovery, even in his own mind. 

"Back on the moon, " Jones went on zestfully, "I wasn't sure that a fieldonce established would hold in atmosphere. I hoped that with enoughpower I could keep it, but I wasn't sure--"

"This doesn't mean much to me, Jones, " said Cochrane. "What does it addup to?"

"Why--the field held down into atmosphere. And we were out of theprimary field as far as the tail of the ship was concerned. But thistime we landed, I'd hooked in some ready-installed circuits. There was asecond Dabney field from the stern of the ship to the bow. There was themain one, going out to those balloons and then back to Earth. But therewas--and is--a second one only enclosing the ship. It's a sort ofbubble. We can still trail a field behind us, and anybody can follow inany sort of ship that's put into it. But now the ship has a completelyindependent, second field. Its tail is never outside!"

Cochrane did not have the sort of mind to find such information eitherlucid or suggestive. 

"So what happens?"

"We have both plates of a Dabney field always with us, " said Jonestriumphantly. "We're always in a field, even landing in atmosphere, andthe ship has practically no mass even when it's letting down to landing. It has weight, but next to no mass. Didn't you notice the difference?"

"Stupid as it may seem, I didn't, " admitted Cochrane. "I haven't theleast idea what you're talking about. "

Jones looked at him patiently. 

"Now we can shoot our exhaust out of the field! The ship-field, not themain one!"

"I'm still numb, " said Cochrane. "Multiple sclerosis of the brain-cells, I suppose. Let me just take your word for it. "

Jones tried once more. 

"Try to see it! Listen! When we landed the first time we had to use alot of fuel because the tail of the ship wasn't in the Dabney field. Ithad mass. So we had to use a lot of rocket-power to slow down that mass. In the field, the ship hasn't much mass--the amount depends on thestrength of the field--but rockets depend for their thrust on the massthat's thrown away astern. Looked at that way, rockets shouldn't pushhard in a Dabney field. There oughtn't to be any gain to be had by thefield at all. You see?"

Cochrane fumbled in his head. 

"Oh, yes. I thought of that. But there is an advantage. The ship doeswork. "

"Because, " said Jones, triumphant again, "the field-effect dependspartly on temperature! The gases in the rocket-blast are hot, away up inthe thousands of degrees. They don't have normal inertia, but they dohave what you might call heat-inertia. They acquire a sort of fictitiousmass when they get hot enough. So we carry along fuel that hasn't anyinertia to speak of when it's cold, but acquires a lunatic sort ofsubstitute for inertia when it's genuinely hot. So a ship can travel ina Dabney field!"

"I'm relieved, " acknowledged Cochrane. "I thought you were about to tellme that we couldn't lift off the moon, and I was going to ask how we gothere. "

Jones smiled patiently. 

"What I'm telling you now is that we can shoot rocket-blasts out of theDabney field we make with the stern of the ship! Landing, we keep ourfuel and the ship with next to no mass, and we shoot it out to where itdoes have mass, and the effect is practically the same as if we werepushing against something solid! And so we started off with fuel formaybe five or six landings and take-offs against Earth gravity. But withthis new trick, we've got fuel for a couple of hundred!"

"Ah!" said Cochrane mildly. "This is the first thing you've said thatmeant anything to me. Congratulations! What comes next?"

"I thought you'd be pleased, " said Jones. "What I'm really telling youis that now we've got fuel enough to reach the Milky Way. "

"Let's not, " suggested Cochrane, "and say we did! You've got a new starpicked out to travel to?"

Jones shrugged his shoulders. In him, the gesture indicated practicallyhysterical frustration. But he said:

"Yes. Twenty-one light-years. Back on Earth they're anxious for us tocheck on sol-type suns and Earth-type planets. "

"For once, " said Cochrane, "I am one with the great scientific minds. Let's go over. "

He made his way to the circular stairway leading down to the mainsaloon. On his clumsy way across the saloon floor to the communicator, he felt the peculiar sensation of the booster-current, which shouldhave been a sound, but wasn't. It was the sensation which had precededthe preposterous leap of the space-ship away from Luna, when in aheart-beat of time all stars looked like streaks of light, and the shiptraveled nearly two light-centuries. 

Sunshine blinked, and then shone again in the ports around the saloonwalls. The second shining came from a different direction--as ifsomebody had switched off one exterior light and turned on another--andat a different angle to the floor. 

Cochrane reached the communicator. He felt no weight. He strappedhimself into the chair. He switched on the vision-phone which sentradiation along the field to a balloon two hundred odd light-years fromEarth--that was the balloon near the glacier planet--and then switchedto the field traveling to a second balloon then the last hundredseventy-odd light-years back to the moon, and then from Luna City downto Earth. 

He put in his call. He got an emergency message that had been waitingfor him. Seconds later he fought his way frantically through no-weightto the control-room again. 

"Jamison! Bell!" he cried desperately. "We've got a broadcast due intwenty minutes! I lost track of time! We're sponsored on four continentsand we damwell have to put on a show! What the devil! Why didn'tsomebody--"

Jamison said obviously from a blister-port where he swung a squatstar-telescope from one object to another:

"Noo-o-o. That's a gas-giant. We'd be squashed if we landedthere--though that big moon looks promising. I think we'd better tryyonder. "

"Okay, " said Jones in a flat voice. "Center on the next one in, Al, andwe'll toddle over. "

Cochrane felt the ship swinging in emptiness. He knew because it seemedto turn while he felt that he stayed still. 

"We've got a show to put on!" he raged. "We've got to fake something--. "

Jamison looked aside from his telescope. 

"Tell him, Bell, " he said expansively. 

"I wrote a script of sorts, " said Bell apologetically. "The story-line'snot so good--that's why I wanted a castaway narrative to put in it, though I wouldn't have had time, really. We spliced film and Jamisonnarrated it, and you can run it off. It's a kind of show. We ran it as aspace-platform survey of the glacier-planet, basing it on pictures wetook while we were in orbit around it. It's a sort of travelogue. Jamison did himself proud. Alicia can find the tape-can for you. "

He went back to his cameras. Cochrane saw a monstrous globe swing past acontrol-room port. It was a featureless mass of clouds, save forstriations across what must be its equator. It looked like the LunarObservatory pictures of Jupiter, back in the Sun's family of planets. 

It went past the port, and a moon swam into view. It was a very largemoon. It had at least one ice-cap--and therefore an atmosphere--andthere were mottlings of its surface which could hardly be anything butcontinents and seas. 

"We've got to put a show on!" raged Cochrane. "And now!"

"It's all set, " Bell assured him. "You can transmit it. I hope you likeit!"

Cochrane sputtered. But there was nothing to do but transmit whateverBell and Jamison had gotten ready. He swam with nightmarelike difficultyback to the communicator. He shouted frantically for Babs. She andAlicia came. Alicia found the film-tape, and Cochrane threaded it intothe transmitter, and bitterly ran the first few feet. Babs smiled athim, and Alicia looked at him oddly. Evidently, Babs had confided theconsequence of their casting-away. But Cochrane faced an emergency. Hebegan to check timings with far-distant Earth. 

When the ship approached a second planet, Cochrane saw nothing of it. Hewas furiously monitoring the broadcast of a show in which he'd had nohand at all. From his own, professional standpoint it was terrible. Jamison spouted interminably, so Cochrane considered. Al, the pilot, wasactually interviewed by an offscreen voice! But the pictures from spacewere excellent. While the ship floated in orbit, waiting to descend topick up Babs and Cochrane, Bell had hooked his camera to an amplifyingtelescope and he did have magnificent shots of dramatic terrain on theplanet now twenty light-years behind. 

Cochrane watched the show in a mingling of jealousy and relief. It wasnot as good as he would have done. But fortunately, Bell and Jamison hadstuck fairly close to straight travelogue-stuff, and close-up shots ofvegetation and animals had been interspersed with the remoter pictureswith moderate competence, if without undue imagination. An audiencewhich had not seen many shows of the kind would be thrilled. It evenamounted to a valid change of pace. Anybody who watched this would atleast want to see more and different pictures from the stars. 

Halfway through, he heard the now-muffled noise of rockets. He knew theship was descending through atmosphere by the steady sound, though hehad not the faintest idea what was outside. He ground his teeth as--fortiming--he received the commercial inserted in the film. The U. S. Commercials served the purpose, of course. He could not watch the otherpictures shown to residents of other than North America in thecommercial portions of the show. 

He was counting seconds to resume transmission when he felt the slightbut distant impact which meant that the ship had touched ground. A veryshort time after, even the lessened, precautionary rocket-roar cut off. 

Cochrane ground his teeth. The ship had landed on a planet he had notseen and in whose choice he had had no hand. He was humiliated. Theother members of the ship's company looked out at scenes no other humaneyes had ever beheld. 

He regarded the final commercial, inserted into the broadcast for itsAmerican sponsor. It showed, purportedly, the true story of two girlfriends, one blonde and one brunette, who were wall-flowers at allparties. They tried frantically to remedy the situation by the use ofthis toothpaste and that, and this deodorant and the other. In vain! Butthen they became the centers of all the festivities they attended, assoon as they began to wash their hair with Rayglo Shampoo. 

Holden and Johnny Simms came clattering down from the control-roomtogether. They looked excited. They plunged together toward thestair-well that would take them to the deck on which the airlock opened. 

Holden panted, "Jed! Creatures outside! They look like men!"

The communicator-screen faithfully monitored the end of the commercial. Two charming girls, radiant and lovely, raised their voices in gratefulsong, hymning the virtues of Rayglo Shampoo. There followed briskreminders of the superlative, magical results obtained by those who usedRayglo Foundation Cream, Rayglo Kisspruf Lipstick, and Rayglo homepermanent--in four strengths; for normal, hard-to-wave, easy-to-wave, and children's hair. 

Cochrane heard the clanking of the airlock door. 

CHAPTER NINE

He made for the control-room, where the ports offered the highest andwidest and best views of everything outside. When he arrived, Babs andAlicia stood together, staring out and down. Bell frantically worked acamera. Jamison gaped at the outer world. Al the pilot made frustratedgestures, not quite daring to leave his controls while there was even anoutside chance the ship's landing-fins might find flaws in theirsupport. Jones adjusted something on the new set of controls he hadestablished for the extra Dabney field. Jones was not wholly normal insome ways. He was absorbed in technical matters even more fully thanCochrane in his own commercial enterprises. 

Cochrane pushed to a port to see. 

The ship had landed in a small glade. There were trees nearby. The treeshad extremely long, lanceolate leaves, roughly the shape of grass-bladesstretched out even longer. In the gentle breeze that blew outside, theywaved extravagantly. There were hills in the distance, and nearbyout-croppings of gray rocks. This sky was blue like the sky of Earth. Itwas, of course, inevitable that any colorless atmosphere withdust-particles suspended in it would establish a blue sky. 

Holden was visible below, moving toward a patch of reed-like vegetationrising some seven or eight feet from the rolling soil. He had hoppedquickly over the scorched area immediately outside the ship. It was muchsmaller than that made by the first landing on the other planet, buteven so he had probably damaged his footwear to excess. But he now stooda hundred yards from the ship. He made gestures. He seemed to betalking, as if trying to persuade some living creature to show itself. 

"We saw them peeping, " said Babs breathlessly, coming beside Cochrane. "Once one of them ran from one patch of reeds to another. It lookedlike a man. There are at least three of them in there--whatever theyare!"

"They can't be men, " said Cochrane grimly. "They can't!" Johnny Simmswas not in sight. "Where's Simms?"

"He has a gun, " said Babs. "He was going to get one, anyhow, so he couldprotect Doctor Holden. "

Cochrane glanced straight down. The airlock door was open, and the endof a weapon peered out. Johnny Simms might be in a better position thereto protect Holden by gun-fire, but he was assuredly safer, himself. There was no movement anywhere. Holden did not move closer to the reeds. He still seemed to be speaking soothingly to the unseen creatures. 

"Why can't there be men here?" asked Babs. "I don't mean actually men, but--manlike creatures? Why couldn't there be rational creatures likeus? I know you said so but--"

Cochrane shook his head. He believed implicitly that there could not bemen on this planet. On the glacier planet every animal had beenseparately devised from the creatures of Earth. There were resemblances, explicable as the result of parallel evolution. By analogy, there couldnot be exactly identical mankind on another world because evolutionthere would be parallel but not the same. But if there were even amental equal to men, no matter how unhuman such a creature might appear, if there were a really rational animal anywhere in the cosmos off ofEarth, the result would be catastrophic. 

"We humans, " Cochrane told her, "live by our conceit. We demand morethan animality of ourselves because we believe we are more thananimals--and we believe we are the only creatures that are! If we cameto believe we were not unique, but were simply a cleverer animal, we'dbe finished. Every nation has always started to destroy itself everytime such an idea spread. "

"But we aren't only clever animals!" protested Babs. "We _are_ unique!"

Cochrane glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. 

"Quite true. "

Holden still stood patiently before the patch of reeds, still seemed totalk, still with his hands outstretched in what men consider theuniversal sign of peace. 

There was a sudden movement at the back of the reed-patch, quite fiftyyards from Holden. A thing which did look like a man fled madly for thenearest edge of woodland. It was the size of a man. It had thepinkish-tan color of naked human flesh. It ran with its head down, andit could not be seen too clearly, but it was startlingly manlike inoutline. Up in the control-room Bell fairly yipped with excitement andswung his camera. Holden remained oblivious. He still tried to luresomething out of concealment. A second creature raced for the woods. 

Tiny gray threads appeared in the air between the airlock and the racingthing. Smoke. Johnny Simms was shooting zestfully at the unidentifiedanimal. He was using that tracer ammunition which poor shots and worsesportsmen adopt to make up for bad marksmanship. 

The threads of smoke seemed to form a net about the running things. Theydodged and zig-zagged frantically. Both of them reached safety. 

A third tried it. And now Johnny Simms turned on automatic fire. Bulletsspurted from his weapon, trailing threads of smoke so that the trailslooked like a stream from a hose. The stream swept through the spaceoccupied by the fugitive. It leaped convulsively and crashed to earth. It kicked blindly. 

Cochrane swore. Between the instant of the beginning of the creature'sflight and this instant, less than two seconds had passed. 

The threads which were smoke-trails drifted away. Then a new threadstreaked out. Johnny Simms fired once more at his still-writhing victim. It kicked violently and was still. 

Holden turned angrily. There seemed to be shoutings between him andJohnny Simms. Then Holden trudged around the reed-patch. There was nolonger any sign of life in the still shape on the ground. But it wasnormal precaution not to walk into a jungle-like thicket in whichunknown, large living things had recently been sighted. Johnny Simmsfired again and again from his post in the airlock. The smoke whichtraced his bullets ranged to the woodland. He shot at imagined targetsthere. He fired at his previous victim simply because it was somethingto shoot at. He shot recklessly, foolishly. 

Alicia, his wife, touched Jamison on the arm and spoke to him urgently. Jamison followed her reluctantly down the stairs. She would be going tothe airlock. Johnny Simms, shooting at the landscape, might shootHolden. A thread of bullet-smoke passed within feet of Holden's body. Heturned and shouted back at the ship. 

The inner airlock door clanked open. There was the sound of a shot, andthe dead thing was hit again. The bullet had been fired dangerouslyclose to Holden. There were voices below. Johnny Simms bellowedenragedly. 

Alicia cried out. 

There was silence below, but Cochrane was already plunging toward thestairs. Babs followed closely. 

When they rushed down onto the dining-room deck they found Aliciadeathly white, but with a flaming red mark on her cheek. They foundJohnny Simms roaring with rage, waving the weapon he'd been shooting. Jamison was uneasily in the act of trying to placate him. 

"----!" bellowed Johnny Simms. "I came on this ship to hunt! I'm goingto hunt! Try and stop me!"

He waved his weapon. 

"I paid my money!" he shouted. "I won't take orders from anybody! Nobodycan boss me!"

Cochrane said icily:

"I can! Stop being a fool! Put down that gun! You nearly shot Holden!You might still kill somebody. Put it down!"

He walked grimly toward Johnny Simms. Johnny was near the open airlockdoor. The outer door was open, too. He could not retreat. He edgedsidewise. Cochrane changed the direction of his advance. There arepeople like Johnny Simms everywhere. As a rule they are not classed asunable to tell right from wrong unless they are rich enough to hire apsychiatrist. Yet a variable but always-present percentage of the humanrace ignores rules of conduct at all times. They are the handicap, theburden, the main hindrance to the maintenance or the progress ofcivilization. They are not consciously evil. They simply do not botherto act otherwise than as rational animals. The rest of humanity has todefend itself with police, with laws, and sometimes with revolts, thoughthose like Johnny Simms have no motive beyond the indulgence ofimmediate inclinations. But for that indulgence Johnny would risk anyinjury to anybody else. 

He edged further aside. Cochrane was white with disgusted fury. JohnnySimms went into panic. He raised his weapon, aiming at Cochrane. 

"Keep back!" he cried ferociously. "I don't care if I kill you!"

And he did not. It was the stark senselessness which makes juveniledelinquents and Hitlers, and causes thugs and hoodlums and snide lawyersand tricky business men. It was the pure perversity which makes sanemen frustrate. It was an example of that infinite stupidity which iscrime, but is also only stupidity. 

Cochrane saw Babs pulling competently at one of the chairs at one of thetables nearby. He stopped, and Johnny Simms took courage. Cochrane saidicily:

"Just what the hell do you think we're here for, anyhow?"

Johnny Simms' eyes were wide and blank, like the eyes of a small boy ina frenzy of destruction, when he has forgotten what he started out to doand has become obsessed with what damage he is doing. 

"I'm not going to be pushed around!" cried Johnny Simms, moreferociously still. "From now on I'm going to tell you what to do--"

Babs swung the chair she had slid from its fastenings. It came down witha satisfying "_thunk_" on Johnny Simms' head. His gun went off. Thebullet missed Cochrane by fractions of an inch. He plunged ahead. 

Some indefinite time later, Babs was pulling desperately at him. He hadJohnny Simms on the floor and was throttling him. Johnny Simms strangledand tore at his fingers. 

Sanity came back to Cochrane with the effect of something snapping. Hegot up. He nodded to Babs and she picked up the gun Johnny Simms hadused. 

"I think, " said Cochrane, breathing hard, "that you're a good sample ofeverything I dislike. The worst thing you do is make me act like you! Ifyou touch a gun again on this ship, I'll probably kill you. If you getarrogant again, I will beat the living daylights out of you! Get up!"

Johnny Simms got up. He looked thoroughly scared. Then, amazingly, hebeamed at Cochrane. He said amiably:

"I forgot. I'm that way. Alicia'll tell you. I don't blame you forgetting mad. I'm sorry. But I'm that way!"

He brushed himself off, beaming at Alicia and Jamison and Babs andCochrane. Cochrane ground his teeth. He went to the airlock and lookeddown outside. 

Holden was bent over the creature Johnny Simms had killed. Hestraightened up and came back toward the ship. He went faster when theground grew hot under his feet. He fairly leaped into the landing-slingand started it up. 

"Not human, " he reported to Cochrane when he slipped from the sling inthe airlock. "There's no question about it when you are close. It's morenearly a bird than anything else. It was warm-blooded. It has a beak. There are penguins on Earth that have been mistaken for men. 

"I did a show once, " said Cochrane coldly, "that had clips of old filmsof cockfighting in it. There was a kind of gamecock called Cornish Gamethat was fairly manshaped. If it had been big enough--Pull in the slingand close the lock. We're moving. "

He turned away. Babs stood by Alicia, offering a handkerchief for Aliciato put to her cheek. Jamison listened unhappily as Johnny Simmsexplained brightly that he had always been that way. When he got excitedhe didn't realize what he was doing. He said almost with pride that hehadn't ever been any other way than that. He didn't really mean to killanybody, but when he got excited--. 

"What happened?" demanded Holden. 

"Our little psychopath, " said Cochrane in a grating voice, "put on anact. He threatened me with a rifle. He hit Alicia first. Jamison, tracethat bullet-hole. See if it got through to the skin of the ship. "

He started for the stairs again. Then he was startled by the frozenimmobility of Holden. Holden's face was deadly. His hands were clenched. Johnny Simms said with a fine boyish frankness:

"I'm sorry, Cochrane! No hard feelings?"

"Yes, " Cochrane snapped. "Hard feelings! I've got them!"

He took Holden's arm. He steered him up the steps. Holden resisted forthe fraction of a second, and Cochrane gripped his arm tighter. He gothim up to the deck above. 

"If I'd been here, " said Holden, unsteadily, "I'd have killed him--if hehit Alicia! Psychopath or no psychopath--"

"Shut up, " said Cochrane firmly. "He shot at me! And in my small way I'ma psychopath too, Bill. My psychosis is that I don't like his kind ofpsychosis. I am psychotically devoted to sense and my possibly quaintidea of decency. I am abnormally concerned with the real world--andyou'd better come back to it! Look here! I'm pathologically in revoltagainst such imbecilities as an overcrowded Earth and people beingafraid of their jobs and people going crackpot from despair. You don'twant me to get cured of that, do you? Then get hold of yourself!"

Bill Holden swallowed. He was still white. But he managed to grimace. 

"You're right. Lucky I was outside. You're not a bad psychologistyourself, Jed. "

"I'm better, " said Cochrane cynically, "at putting on shows with scrapfilm-tape and dream-stuff. So I'm going to look at the films Bell tookas we landed on this planet, and work out some ideas for broadcasts. "

He went up another flight, and Holden went with him in a sort of stilly, unnatural calm. Cochrane ran the film-tape through the reversed camerafor examination. 

Outside, there waved long green tresses of extraordinarily elongatedleaves. The patches of reed-like stuff stirred in the breeze. Jamisonappeared in the control-room. He began to question Holden hopefullyabout the ground-cover outside. It was not grass. It was broad-leaved. There would be, Jamison decided happily, an infinitude of under-leafforms of life. They would most likely be insects, and there would becarnivorous other insects to prey upon them. Some species would find itadvantageous to be burrowing insects. There must be other kinds of birdsthan the giant specimens that looked like men at a distance, too. On theglacier planet there had been few birds but many furry creatures. Possibly the situation was reversed here, though of course it need notbe . .. 

"Hm, " said Cochrane when the films were all run through. "Ice-caps andland and seas. Plenty of green vegetation, so presumably the air isnormal for humans. Since you're alive, Holden, we can assume it isn'tinstantly fatal, can't we? The gravity's tolerable--a little on thelight side, maybe, compared to the glacier planet. "

He was silent, staring at the blank wall of the control-room. Hefrowned. Suddenly he said:

"Does anybody back on Earth know that Babs and I were castaways?"

"No, " said Holden, still very quiet indeed. "Alicia ran thecontrol-board. She told everybody you were too busy to be called to thecommunicator. It was queer with you away! Jamison and Bell tiedthemselves in chairs and spliced tape. Johnny, of course"--his voice wasvery carefully toneless--"wouldn't do anything useful. I was space-sicka lot of the time. But I did help Alicia figure out what to say on thecommunicator. There must be hundreds of calls backed up for you totake. "

"Good!" said Cochrane. "I'll go take some of them. Jones, could we makea flit to somewhere else on this planet?"

Jones said negligently, "I told you we've got fuel to reach the Milky Way. Where do you want togo?"

"Anywhere, " said Cochrane. "The scenery isn't dramatic enough here for anew broadcast. We've got to have some lurid stuff for our next show. Things are shaping up except for the need of just the right scenery tosend back to Earth. "

"What kind of scenery do you want?"

"Animals preferred, " said Cochrane. "Dinosaurs would do. Or buffalo or areasonable facsimile. What I'd actually like more than anything elsewould really be a herd of buffalo. "

Jamison gasped. 

"Buffalo?"

"Meat, " said Cochrane in an explanatory tone. "On the hoof. Thepublic-relations job all this has turned into, demands a carefulstimulation of all the basic urges. So I want people to think of steaksand chops and roasts. If I could get herds of animals from one horizonto another--. "

"Meat-herds coming up, " said Jones negligently. "I'll call you. "

Cochrane did not believe him. He went down to the communicator again. Heprepared to take the calls from Earth that had been backed up behind theemergency demand for an immediate broadcast-show that he'd met while theship came to its landing. There was an enormous amount of business piledup. And it was slow work handling it. His voice took six seconds to passthrough something over two hundred light-years of space in the Dabneyfield, and then two seconds in normal space from the relay in LunarCity. It was twelve seconds between the time he finished sayingsomething before the first word of the reply reached him. It was veryslow communication. He reflected annoyedly that he'd have to ask Jonesto make a special Dabney field communication field as strong as wasnecessary to take care of the situation. 

The rockets growled and roared outside. The ship lifted. Johnny Simmscame storming up from below. 

"My trophy!" he cried indignantly. "I want my trophy!"

Cochrane looked up impatiently from the screen. 

"What trophy?"

"The thing I shot!" cried Johnny Simms fiercely. "I want to have itmounted! Nobody else ever killed anything like that! I want it!"

The ship surged upward more strongly. Cochrane said coldly:

"It's too late now. Get out. I'm busy. "

He returned his eyes to the screen. Johnny Simms raced for the stairs. Alittle later Cochrane heard shoutings in the control-room. But he wastoo busy to inquire. 

The ship drifted--with all the queasy sensation of no-weight--and liftedagain, and then there was a fairly long period of weightlessness. Atsuch times Holden would be greenish and sick and tormented byspace-sickness. Which might be good for him at this particular time. Fora long time, it seemed, there were alternating periods of lift and freefall, which in themselves were disturbing. Once the free fall lasteduntil Cochrane began to feel uneasy. But then the rockets roared oncemore and boomed loudly as if the ship were leaving the planetaltogether. 

But Cochrane was talking business. In part he bluffed. In part, quiteautomatically, he demanded much more than he expected to get, simplybecause it is the custom in business not to be frank about anything. Whatever he asked, the other man would offer less. So he asked too much, and the other man offered too little, each knowing in advance verynearly on what terms they would finally settle. Considering the cost ofbeam-phone time to Lunar City, not to mention the extension to thestars, it was absurd, but it was the way business is done. 

Presently Cochrane called Babs and Alicia and had them witness atentative agreement, which had to be ratified by a board of directors ofa corporation back on Earth. That board would jump at it, but thestipulation for possible cancellation had to be made. It wasmumbo-jumbo. Cochrane felt satisfyingly competent at handling it. 

While the formalities were in progress, the ship surged and fell andswayed and surged again. Cochrane said ruefully:

"I hate to ask you to work under conditions like this, Babs. "

Babs grinned. He flushed a little. 

"I know! When you were working for me I wasn't considerate. "

"Who am I working for now?"

"Us, " said Cochrane. Then he looked guiltily at Alicia. He feltembarrassment at having said anything in the least sentimental beforeher. Considering Johnny Simms, it was not too tactful. Her cheek, whereit had been red, now showed a distinct bruise. He said: "Sorry, Alicia--about Johnny. "

"I got into it myself, " said Alicia. "I loved him. He isn't really bad. If you want to know, I think he simply decided years ago that hewouldn't grow up past the age of six. He was a rich man's spoiled littleboy. It was fun. So he made a career of it. His family let him. I"--shesmiled faintly, "I'm making a career of taking care of him. "

"Something can be done even with a six-year-old, " growled Cochrane. "Holden--. But he wouldn't be the best one to try. "

"He definitely wouldn't be the best one to try, " said Alicia veryquietly. 

Cochrane turned away. She knew how Bill Holden felt. Which might ormight not be comforting to him. 

The communicator again. The pictures of foot-high furry bipeds on theglacier planet had made a sensation on television. A toy-manufacturerwanted the right to make toys like them. The pictures were copyrighted. Cochrane matter-of-factly made the deal. There would be miniatureextra-terrestrial animals on sale in all toy-shops within days. Spaceways, Inc. , would collect a royalty on each toy sold. 

The rockets boomed, and lessened their noise, and wavered up and downagain. Then there was that deliberate, crunching feel of the greatlanding-fins pressing into soil with all the ship's weight bearing down. The rockets ran on, drumming ever-so-faintly, for a little longer. Thenthey cut off. 

"We're landed again! Let's see where we are!"

They went up to the control-room. Johnny Simms stood against the wall, sulking. He had managed his life very successfully by acting like aspoiled little boy. Now he had lost any idea of saner conduct. At themoment, he looked ridiculous. But Alicia had a bruised cheek andCochrane could have been killed, and Holden had been in danger becauseJohnny Simms wanted to and insisted on acting like a rich man's spoiledlittle boy. 

It occurred to Cochrane that Alicia would probably find recompense forher humiliation and pain in the little-boy penitence--exactly astemporary as any other little-boy emotion--when she and Johnny Simmswere alone together. 

The ship had come down close to the sunset-line of the planet. Away tothe west there was the glint of blue sea. Dusk was already descendinghere. There were smoothly contoured hills in view, and there was a darkpatch of forest on one hilltop, and the trees at the woodland's edge hadthe same drooping, grass-blade-like foliage of the trees first seen. Butthere were larger and more solid giants among them. The ship had landedon a small plateau, and downhill from it a spring gushed out with suchforce that the water-surface was rounded by pressure from below. Thewater overflowed and went down toward the sea. 

"I think we're all right, " said Al, the pilot. But he stayed in hisseat, in case the ship threatened to sway over. Cochrane inspected theouter world. 

"Well?"

"We sighted what I think you want, " said Jones. He looked dead-pan andyet secretly complacent. "Just watch. "

The dusk grew deeper. Colorings appeared in the west. They were verysimilar to the sunset-colorings on Earth. 

"Not many volcanoes here. "

The amount of dust was limited, as on Earth. A great star winked intoview in the east. It was as bright as Venus seen from Earth. It had ajust-perceptible disk. Close to it, infinitely small, there was a speckof light which seemed somehow like a star. Cochrane squinted at it. Hethought of the great gas-giant world he'd seen out a port on the wayhere. It had an attendant moon-world which itself had icecaps and seasand continents. He called Jamison. 

"I think that's the planet, " agreed Jamison. "We passed close by it. Wesaw it. "

"It had a moon, " observed Cochrane. "A big one. It looked like a worlditself. What would it be like there?"

"Cooler than this, " said Jamison promptly, "because it's farther fromthe sun. But it might pick up some heat from reflection from itsprimary's white clouds. It would be a fair world. It has oceans andcontinents and strings of foam-girt islands. But its sea is strange anddark and restless. Gigantic tides surge in its depths, drawn by theplanetary colossus about which it swings. Its animal life--. "

"Cut, " said Cochrane dryly. "What do you really think? Could it beanother inhabitable world for people to move to?"

Jamison looked annoyed at having been cut off. 

"Probably, " he said more prosaically. "The tides would be monstrous, though. "

"Might be used for power, " said Cochrane. "We'll see . .. "

Then Jones spoke with elaborate casualness:

"Here's something to look at. On the ground. "

Cochrane moved to see. The dusk had deepened still more. The smooth, green-covered ground had become a dark olive. Where bare hillsides gaveupon the sky, there were dark masses flowing slowly forward. The edgesof the hills turned black, and the blackness moved down their nearerslopes. It was not an even front of darkness. There were patches whichpreceded the others. They did not stay distinct. They merged with themasses which followed them, and other patches separated in their places. All of the darkness moved without haste, with a sort of inexorabledeliberation. It moved toward the ship and the valley and the gushingfountain and the stream which flowed from it. 

"What on Earth--" began Cochrane. 

"You're not on Earth, " said Jones chidingly. "Al and I found 'em. Youasked for buffalo or a reasonable facsimile. I won't guarantee anything;but we spotted what looked like herds of beasts moving over the greenplains inland. We checked, and they seemed to be moving in thisdirection. Once we dropped down low and Bell got some pictures. When heenlarged them, we decided they'd do. So we lined up where they were allheaded for, and here we are. And here they are!"

Cochrane stared with all his eyes. Behind him, he heard Bell fuming tohimself as he tried to adjust a camera for close-up pictures in thelittle remaining light. Babs stood beside Cochrane, staringincredulously. 

The darkness was beasts. They blackened the hillsides on three sides ofthe ship. They came deliberately, leisurely onward. They were literallyuncountable. They were as numerous as the buffalo that formerly throngedthe western plains of America. In black, shaggy masses, they came towardthe spring and its stream. Nearby, their heads could be distinguished. And all of this was perfectly natural. 

The cosmos is one thing. Where life exists, its living creatures willfit themselves cunningly into each niche where life can be maintained. On vast green plains there will be animals to graze--and there will beanimals to prey on them. So the grazing things will band together inherds for self-defense and reproduction. And where the ground is coveredwith broad-leaved plants, such plants will shelter innumerable tinycreatures, and some of them will be burrowers. So rain will drainquickly into those burrowings and not make streams. And therefore thedrainage will reappear as springs, and the grazing animals will go tothose springs to drink. Often, they will gather more densely atnightfall for greater protection from their enemies. They will evenoften gather at the springs or their overflowing brooks. This willhappen anywhere that plains and animals exist, on any planet to the edgeof the galaxy, because there are laws for living things as well asstones. 

Great dark masses of the beasts moved unhurriedly past the ship. Theywere roughly the size of cattle--which itself would be determined by thegravity of the planet, setting a maximum favorable size for grazingbeasts with an ample food-supply. There were thousands and tens ofthousands of them visible in the deepening night. They crowded to thegushing spring and to the stream that flowed from it. They drank. Sometimes groups of them waited patiently until the way to the water wasclear. 

"Well?" said Jones. 

"I think you filled my order, " admitted Cochrane. 

The night became starlight only, and Cochrane impatiently demanded of Alor somebody that they measure the length of a complete day and night onthis planet. The stars would move overhead at such-and-such a rate. Somany degrees in so much time. He needed, said Cochrane--as if this orderalso could be filled--a day-length not more than six hours shorter orlonger than an Earth-day. 

Jones and Al conferred and prepared to take some sort of reading withoutany suitable instrument. Cochrane moved restlessly about. He did notnotice Johnny Simms. Johnny had stood sullenly in his place, not movingto look out the windows, ostentatiously ignoring everything andeverybody. And nobody paid attention! It was not a matter to offend anadult, but it was very shocking indeed to a rich man's son who had beenable to make a career of staying emotionally at a six-year-old level. 

Cochrane's thoughts were almost feverish. If the day-length here wassuitable, all his planning was successful. If it was too long or tooshort, he had grimly to look further--and Spaceways, Inc. , would stillnot be as completely a success as he wanted. It would have been muchsimpler to have measured the apparent size of the local sun by any meansavailable, and then simply to have timed the intervals between itstouching of the horizon and its complete setting. But Cochrane hadn'tthought of it at sunset. 

Presently he wandered down to where Babs and Alicia worked in thekitchen to prepare a meal. He tried to help. The atmosphere was muchmore like that in a small apartment back home than on a space-ship amongthe stars. This was not in any way such a journey of exploration as thewriters of fiction had imagined. Jamison came down presently and offeredto prepare some special dish in which he claimed to excel. There was nomention of Johnny Simms. Alicia, elaborately ignoring all that was past, told Jamison that Babs and Cochrane were now an acknowledged romance andactually had plans for marriage immediately the ship returned to Earth. Jamison made the usual inept jests suited to such an occasion. 

Presently they called the others to dinner. Jones and Johnny Simms werelong behind the others, and Jones' expression was conspicuouslydead-pan. Johnny Simms looked sulkily rebellious. His sulking had notattracted attention in the control-room. He had meant to refuse sulkilyto come to dinner. But Jones wouldn't trust him--alone in thecontrol-room. Now he sat down, scowling, and ostentatiously refused toeat, despite Alicia's coaxing. He snarled at her. 

This, also, was not in the tradition of the behavior of voyagers ofspace. They dined in the over-large saloon of a ship that had never beenmeant really to leave the moon. The ship stood upright under strangestars upon a stranger world, and all about it outside there were theresting forms of thousands upon thousands of creatures like cattle. Andthe dinner-table conversation was partly family-style jests about Babs'and Cochrane's new romantic status, and partly about a televisionbroadcast which had to be ready for a certain number of Earth-hours yetahead. And nobody paid any attention to Johnny Simms, glowering at thetable and refusing to eat. 

It was a mistake, probably. 

Much, much later, Cochrane and Babs were again in the control-room, andthis time they were alone. 

"Look!" said Cochrane vexedly. "Do you realize that I haven't kissed yousince we got back on the ship? What happened?"

"You!" said Babs indignantly. "You've been thinking about something elseevery second of the time!"

Cochrane did not think about anything else for several minutes. He beganto recall with new tolerance the insane antics of people he had beenproducing shows about. They had reason--those imaginary people--to actunreasonably. 

But presently his mind was working again. 

"We've got to make some plans for ourselves, " he said. "We can live backon Earth, of course. We've already made a neat sum out of the broadcastsfrom this trip. But I don't think we'll want to live the way one has tolive on Earth, with too many people there. I'd like--. "

Somebody came clattering up the stairs from below. 

"Johnny?" It was Bell. "Is he up here?"

Cochrane released Babs. 

"No. He's not here. Why?"

"He's missing, " said Bell apprehensively. "Alicia says he took a gun. Agun's gone, anyhow. He's vanished!"

Cochrane swore under his breath. A fool asserting his dignity with a guncould be a serious matter indeed. He switched on the control-roomlights. He was not there. They went down and hunted over the mainsaloon. He was not there. Then Holden called harshly from the next deckdown. 

There was Alicia by the inner airlock door. Her face was deathly pale. She had opened the door. The outer door was open too--and it had notbeen opened since this last landing by anybody else. The landing-slingcables were run out. They swung slowly in the light that fell upon themfrom the inside of the ship. 

A smell came in the opening. It was the smell of beasts. It was a musky, ammoniacal smell, somehow not alien even though it was unfamiliar. Therewere noises outside in the night. Grunting sounds. Snortings. There weresuch sounds as a vast concourse of grazing creatures would make in thenight-time, when gathered by thousands and myriads for safety and forrest. 

"He--went out, " said Alicia desperately. "He meant to punish us. He's aspoiled little boy. We weren't nice to him. And--he was afraid of ustoo! So he ran away to make us sorry!"

Cochrane went to look out of the lock and to call Johnny Simms back. Hegazed into absolute blackness on the ground. He felt a queasy giddinessbecause there was no hand-railing at the outer lock door and he knew thedepth of the fall outside. He raged, within himself. Johnny Simms wouldfeel triumphant when he was called. He would require to be pleaded withto return. He would pompously set terms for returning before he waskilled. .. . 

Cochrane saw a flash of fire and the short streak of a tracer-bullet'spatch before it hit something. He heard the report of the gun. He hearda bellow of agony and then a scream of purest terror from Johnny Simms. 

Then, from the ground, arose a truly monstrous tumult. Every one of thecreatures below raised its voice in a horrible, bleating cry. The volumeof sound was numbing--was agonizing in sheer impact. There werestirrings and clickings as of horns clashing against each other. 

Another scream from Johnny Simms. He had moved. It appeared that he wasrunning. Cochrane saw more gun-flashes, there were more shots. Heclenched his hands and waited for the thunderous vibration that would beall this multitude of animals pounding through the night in blindstampede. 

It did not come. There was only that bleating, horrible outcry as allthe beasts bellowed of alarm and created this noise to frighten theirassailants away. 

Twice more there were shots in the night. Johnny Simms fired crazily andscreamed in hysterical panic. Each time the shots and screaming werefarther away. 

There were no portable lights with which to make a search. It wasunthinkable to go blundering among the beasts in darkness. 

There was nothing to do. Cochrane could only watch and listen helplesslywhile the strong beast-smell rose to his nostrils, and the innumerablenoises of unseen uneasy creatures sounded in his ears. 

Inside the ship Alicia wept hopelessly. Babs tried in vain to comforther. 

CHAPTER TEN

The sun rose. Cochrane noted the time, it was fourteen hours sincesunset. The local day would be something more than an Earth-day inlength. The manner of sunrise was familiar. There was a pale gray lightin the sky. It strengthened. Then reddish colors appeared, and changedto gold, and the unnamed stars winked out one after another. Presentlythe nearer hillsides ceased to be black. There was light everywhere. 

Alicia, white and haggard, waited to see what the light would show. 

But there was heavy mist everywhere. The hill-crests were clear, and theedge of the visible woodland, and the top half of the ship's shininghull rose clear of curiously-tinted, slowly writhing fog. But everythingelse seemed submerged in a sea of milk. 

But the mist grew thinner as the sun shone on it. Its top writhed tonothingness. All this was wholly commonplace. Even clouds in the skywere of types well-known enough. Which was, when one thought about it, inevitable. This was a Sol-type sun, of the same kind and color as thestar which warmed the planet Earth. It had planets, like the sun ofmen's home world. There was a law--Bode's Law--which specified thatplanets must float in orbits bearing such-and-such relationships to eachother. There must also be a law that planets in those orbits must bearsuch-and-such relationships of size to each other. There must be a lawthat winds must blow under ordinary conditions, and clouds form atappointed heights and times. It would be very remarkable if Earth werean exception to natural laws that other worlds obey. 

So the strangeness of the morning to those who watched from the ship wasmore like the strangeness of an alien land on Earth than that of awholly alien planet. 

The lower dawnmist thinned. Gazing down, Cochrane saw dark massesmoving slowly past the ship's three metal landing-fins. They were thebeasts of the night, moving deliberately from their bed-ground to thevast plains inland. There were bunches of hundreds, and bunches ofscores. There were occasional knots of dozens only. 

From overhead and through the mist Cochrane could not see individualanimals too clearly, but they were heavy beasts and clumsy ones. Theymoved sluggishly. Their numbers dwindled. He saw groups of no more thanfour or five. He saw single animals trudging patiently away. 

He saw no more at all. 

Then the sunlight touched the inland hills. The last of the morning mistdissolved, and there were the dead bodies of two beasts near the base ofthe ship. Johnny Simms had killed them with his first panicky shots ofthe night. There was another dead beast a quarter-mile away. 

Cochrane gave orders. Jones and Al could not leave the ship. They wereneeded to get it back to Earth, with full knowledge of how to make otherstarships. Cochrane tried to leave Babs behind, but she would not stay. Bell had loaded himself with a camera and film-tape besides a weapon, before Cochrane even began his organization. Holden was needed for anextra gun. Alicia, tearless and despairing, would not be left behind. Cochrane turned wryly to Jamison. 

"I don't think Johnny was killed, " he said. "He'd gotten a long way offbefore it happened, anyhow. We've got to hunt for him. With beasts likethose of last night, there'll naturally be other creatures to prey onthem. We might run into anything. If we don't get back, you get to thelawyers I've had representing Spaceways. They'll get rich off the job, but you'll end up rich, too. "

"The best bet all around, " said Jamison in a low tone, "would be to findhim trampled to death. "

"I agree, " said Cochrane sourly. "But apparently the beasts don'tstampede. Maybe they don't even charge, but just form rings to protecttheir females and young, like musk-oxen. I'm afraid he's alive, but I'malso afraid we'll never find him. "

He marshaled his group. Jones had walkie-talkies ready, deftly removedfor the purpose from space-suits nobody had used since leaving LunarCity--and Holden took one to keep in touch by. They went down in thesling, two at a time. 

Cochrane regarded the two dead animals near the base of the ship. Theywere roughly the size of cattle, and they were shaggy like buffalo. Theyhad branching, pointed, deadly horns. They had hoofs, single hoofs, notcloven. They were not like any Earth animal. But horns and hoofs willappear in any system of parallel evolution. It would seem even morecertain that proteins and amino acids and such compounds as hemoglobinand fat and muscle-tissue should be identical as a matter of chemicalinevitability. These creatures had teeth and they were herbivorous. Bellphotographed them painstakingly. 

"Somehow, " said Cochrane, "I think they'd be wholesome food. If we can, we'll empty a freezing-locker and take a carcass for tests. "

Holden fingered his rifle unhappily. Alicia said nothing. Babs stayedclose beside her. They went on. 

They came to another dead animal a quarter-mile away. The ground wasfull of the scent and the hoofmarks of the departed herd. Bellphotographed again. They did not stop. Johnny Simms had been this way, because of the carcass. He wasn't here now. 

They topped the next rise in the ground. They saw two other slaughteredcreatures. It was wholly evident, now, that these animals did not chargebut only stood their ground when alarmed. Johnny Simms had fired blindlywhen he blundered into their groupings. 

The last carcass they saw was barely two hundred yards from the onepatch of woodland visible from the ship. Cochrane said with somegrimness. 

"If his eyes had gotten used to the darkness, he might have seen theforest and tried to get into it to get away from those animals. "

And if Johnny Simms had not stopped short instantly he reached the woodsand presumable safety, he would be utterly lost by now. There could benothing less hopeful than the situation of a man lost on a strangeplanet, not knowing in what direction he had blundered on his firststarting out. Even nearby, three directions out of four would be wrong. Farther away, the chance of stumbling on the way back to the ship wouldbe nonexistent. 

Alicia saw a human footprint on the trodden muck near the last carcass. It pointed toward the wood. 

They reached the wood, and search looked hopeless. Then by purest chancethey found a place where Johnny had stumbled and fallen headlong. He'dleaped up and fled crazily. For some fifteen yards they could track himby the trampled dried small growths he'd knocked down in his flight. Then there were no more such growths. All signs of his flight were lost. But they went on. 

There were strangenesses everywhere, of which they could realize only asmall part because they had been city-dwellers back on Earth. There wasone place where trees grew like banyans, and it was utterly impossibleto penetrate them. They swerved aside. There was another spot wheregiant trees like sequoias made a cathedral-like atmosphere, and itseemed an impiety to speak. But Holden reported tonelessly in thewalkie-talkie, and assured Jones and Al and Jamison that all so far waswell. 

They heard a vast commotion of chattering voices, and they hoped that itmight be a disturbance of Johnny Simms' causing. But when they reachedthe place there was dead silence. Only, there were hundreds of tinynests everywhere. They could not catch a glimpse of a single one of thenests' inhabitants, but they felt that they were peeked at from underleaves and around branches. 

Cochrane looked unhappy indeed. In cold blood, he knew that Johnny Simmshad left the ship in exactly the sort of resentful bravado with which aspoiled little boy will run away from home to punish his parents. Quitepossibly he had intended only to go out into the night and wait near theship until he was missed. But he'd found himself among the unknownbeasts. He'd gone into blind panic. Now he was lost indeed. 

But one could not refuse to search for him simply because it washopeless. Cochrane could not imagine doing any less than continuing tosearch as long as Alicia had hope. She might hope on indefinitely. 

They heard the faint, distant, incisive sound of a shot. 

Holden's voice reported it in the walkie-talkie. Cochrane noddedbrightly to Alicia and fired a shot in turn. He was relieved. It lookedlike everything would end in a commonplace fashion. The party from theship headed toward the source of the other sound. 

In half an hour Cochrane was about to fire again. But they heard thehysterical rat-tat-tat of firing. It seemed no nearer, but it could onlybe Johnny Simms. 

Cochrane and Holden fired together for assurance to Johnny. Bell tookpictures. 

Again they marched toward where the shots had been fired. Again theytrudged on for a long time. Seemingly, Johnny had moved away from themas they followed him. They breasted a hill, and there was a breeze withthe smell of water in it, and they saw that here the land sloped verygradually toward the sea, and the sea was in view. It was infinitelyblue and it reached toward the most alluring of horizons. Between themand the sea there was only low-growing stuff, brownish and sparse. Therewas sand underfoot--a curious bluish sand. Only here and there did thedry-seeming vegetation grow higher than their heads. 

More shots. Between them and the sea. Cochrane and Holden fired again. 

"What the devil's the matter with the fool?" demanded Holden irritably. "He knows we're coming! Why doesn't he stand still or come to meet us?"

Cochrane shrugged. That thought was disturbing him too. They pressedforward, and suddenly Holden exclaimed. "That looks like a man! Twomen!"

Cochrane caught the barest glimpse of something running about, farahead. It looked like naked human flesh. It was the size of a man. Itvanished. Another popped into view and darted madly out of sight. Theydid not see the newcomers. 

"He shot something like that, back where we first landed, " said Cochranegrimly. "We'd better hurry!"

They did hurry. There was a last flurry of shooting. It was automaticfire. It is not wise to shoot on automatic if one's ammunition islimited, Johnny Simms' firearm chattered furiously for part of a second. It stopped short. He couldn't have fired so short a burst. He was out ofbullets. 

They ran. 

When they drew near him, a hooting set up. Things scattered away. Largethings. Birds the size of men. They heard Johnny Simms screaming. 

They came panting to the very beach, on which foam-tipped waves broke inabsolutely normal grandeur. The sand was commonplace save for a slightbluish tint. Johnny Simms was out on the beach, in the open. He wasdown. He had flung his gun at something and was weaponless. He lay onthe sand, shrieking. There were four ungainly, monstrous birds likeoversized Cornish Game gamecocks pecking at him. Two ran crazily away atsight of the humans. Two others remained. Then they fled. One of themhalted, darted back, and took a last peck at Johnny Simms before it fledagain. 

Holden fired, and missed. Cochrane ran toward the kicking, shriekingJohnny Simms. But Alicia got there first. 

He was a completely pitiable object. His clothing had been almostcompletely stripped away in the brief time since his last burst ofshots. There were wounds on his bare flesh. After all, the beak of abird as tall as a man is not a weapon to be despised. Johnny Simms wouldhave been pecked to death but for the party from the ship. He had beenspotted and harried by a huntingpack of the ostrich-sized creatures atearliest dawn. A cooler-headed man would have stood still and killedsome of them, then the rest would either have run away or devoured theirslaughtered fellows. But Johnny Simms was not cool-headed. He had made acareer of being a rich man's spoiled little boy. Now he'd had a frightgreat enough and an escape narrow enough to shatter the nerves of anormal man. To Johnny Simms, the effect was catastrophic. 

He could not walk, and the distance was too great to carry him. Holdenreported by walkie-talkie, and Jones proposed to butcher one of theanimals Johnny had killed and put it in a freezer emptied for thepurpose, and then lift the ship and land by the sea. It seemed areasonable proposal. Johnny was surely not seriously wounded. 

But that meant time to wait. Alicia sat by her husband, soothing him. Holden moved along the beach, examining the shells that had come ashore. He picked up one shell more glorious in its coloring than any of thepearl-making creatures of Earth. This shell grew neither in the flatspiral nor the cone-shaped form of Earth mollusks. It grew in adoubly-curved spiral, so that the result was an extraordinary, lustrous, complex sphere. Bell fairly danced with excitement as he photographed itwith lavish pains to get all the colors just right. 

Cochrane and Babs moved along the beach also. It was not possible to beapprehensive. Cochrane talked largely. Presently he was saying withinfinite satisfaction:

"The chemical compounds here are bound to be the same! It's a new world, bigger than the glacier planet. Those beasts last night--if they're goodfood-stuff--will make this a place like the old west, and everybodyenvies the pioneers! This is a new Earth! Everything's so nearly thesame--. "

"I never, " observed Babs, "heard of blue sand on Earth. "

He frowned at her. He stooped and picked up a handful of the beachstuff. It was not blue. The tiny, sea-broken pebbles were ordinaryquartz and granite rock. They would have to be. Yet there was ablueness--The blue grains were very much smaller than the white and tanand gray ones. Cochrane looked closely. Then he blew. All the sand blewout of his hand except--at last--one tiny grain. It was white. Itglittered greasily. Cochrane moved four paces and wetted his hand in thesea. He tried to wet the sand-grain. It would not wet. 

He began to laugh. 

"I did a show once, " he told Babs, "about the old diamond-mines. Everhear of them? They used to find diamonds in blue clay which was as hardas rock. Here, blue clay goes out from the land to under the waves. Thisis a tiny diamond, washed out by the sea! This is the last thing weneed!" Then he looked at his watch. "We're due on the air in two hoursand a half! Now we've got what we want! Let's go have Holden tell Jonesto hurry!"

But Babs complained suddenly, "Jed! What sort of life am I going to lead with you? Here we are, and--nobody can see us--and you don't even notice!"

Cochrane was penitent. In fact, they had to hurry back down the beach tojoin the others when the space-ship appeared as a silvery gleam, high inthe air, and then came swooping down with fierce flames underneath it tosettle a quarter-mile inland. 

Bell had a picture of the tiny diamond by the time the ground was coolenough for them to re-enter the ship. The way he photographed it, against a background which had nothing by which its size could beestimated, the little white stone looked like a Kohinoor. It was twotransparent pyramids set base to base, and he even got color-flashesfrom it. And Jamison, forewarned, took pictures from the air of theblue-sand areas. They showed the tint the one tiny diamond explained. 

The broadcast was highly successful. It began with a four-minutecommercial in which the evils of faulty elimination were discussed withinfinite delicacy, and it was clearly proved--to an audience waiting tolook beyond the stars--that only Greshham's Intestinal Emollient allowedthe body to make full use of vitamins, proteins, and the very newestenzymatic foundation-substances which everybody needed for reallyperfect health. There followed the approach shots to this planet, shotsof the great beast-herds on the plains, views of luxuriant, wavingfoliage, the tide of shaggy animals as they came at dusk to theirdrinking-place, and there was an all-too-brief picturing of theblue-tinted soil which the last film-clip of all declared to bediamondiferous. 

Cochrane's direction of this show was almost inspired. The views of theanimal herd were calculated to make any member of his audience think insimultaneous terms of glamour and adventure--with perfect personalsafety, of course!--and of steaks, chops and roasts. The more giftedviewers back on Earth might even envision filets mignon. Theinfinitesimal diamond with its prismatic glitterings, of course, rousedcupidity of another sort. 

There were four commercials cut into these alluring views, the last wassuperimposed upon a view Bell had taken of the sunset-colors. And itmight have seemed that the television audience would confuse the charmof the new world as pictured with the product insistently praised. Butthe public was pretty well toughened up against commercials nowadays. Itwas not deceived. As usual, it only deceived itself. 

But there was no deception about the fact that there was a new andunoccupied planet fit for human habitation. That was true. And thefretting overcrowded cities immediately became places where everybodymade happy plans for his neighbor to move there. But the more irritablepeople would begin to think vaguely that it might be worth going to, forthemselves. 

The ship took off two hours after the broadcast. Part of that time wastaken up with astrogational conferences with astronomers on Earth. Cochrane had this conference taped for the auxiliary broadcast-programin which the audience shared the problems as well as the triumphs of thestar-voyagers. Cochrane wanted to get back to Earth. So far astelevision was concerned, it would be unwise. The ship and its crewwould travel indefinitely without a lack of sponsors. But for once, Cochrane agreed entirely with Holden. 

"We're heading back, " he told Babs, "because if we keep on, people willaccept our shows as just another superior kind of escape-entertainment. They'll have the dream quality of 'You Win a Million' and thelottery-shows. They'll be things to dream about but never to think ofdoing anything about. We're going to make the series disappointinglyshort, in order to make it more convincingly factual. We won't spin itout for its entertainment-value until it practically loses everythingelse. "

"No, " said Babs. She put her hand in his. She'd found it necessary toremind him, now and then. 

So the ship started home. And it would not return direct to Earth--orLunar City--for a very definite reason. Cochrane meant to have all hisbusiness affairs neatly wrapped up before landing. They could getanother show or two across, and some highly involved contracts could behaggled to completion more smoothly if one of the parties--Spaceways, Inc. --was not available except when it felt like being available. Theother parties would be more anxious. 

So the astrogation-conference did not deal with a direct return toEarth, but with a small sol-type star not too far out of the directline. The Pole Star could have been visited, but it was a double star. Cochrane had no abstract scientific curiosity. His approach was strictlythat of a man of business. He did the business. 

There was, of course, a suitable pause not too far from the secondplanet--the planet of the shaggy beasts. They put out a plastic balloonwith a Dabney field generator inside it. It would float in emptinessindefinitely. The field would hold for not less than twenty years. Itwould serve as a beacon, a highway, a railroad track through space forother ships planning to visit the third world now available to men. Ultimately, better arrangements could be made. 

Jones was already ecstatically designing ground-level Dabney fieldinstallations. There would be Dabney fields extending from star to star. Along them, as along pneumatic tubes, ships would travel at unthinkablespeeds toward absolutely certain destinations. True, at times they couldnot be used because of the bulk of planets between starting-points andlanding-stations. But with due attention to scheduling, it would be asimple matter indeed to arrange for something close to commuters'service between star-clusters. He explained all this to Cochrane, withHolden listening in. 

"Oh, surely!" said Cochrane cynically. "And you'll have tax-payersobjecting because you make money. You'll be regulated out of existence. Were you thinking that Spaceways would run this transportation systemyou're planning, without cutting anybody else in on even the glory ofit?"

Jones looked at him, dead-pan. But he was annoyed. 

"I want some money, " he said. "I thought we could get this thing set up, and then I could get myself a ship and facilities for doing some reallyoriginal work. I'd like to work something out and not have to sell thepublicity-rights to it!"

"I'll arrange it, " promised Cochrane. "I've got our lawyers setting up adeal right now. You're going to get as many tricky patents as you can onthis field, and assign them all to Spaceways. And Spaceways is going toassign them all to a magnificent Space Development Association, a sortof Chamber of Commerce for all the outer planets, and all the stuffedshirts in creation are going to leap madly to get honorary posts on it. And it will be practically beyond criticism, and it will have the publicinterest passionately at its heart, and it will be practically beyondinterference and it will be as inefficient as hell! And the moreinefficient it is, the more it will have to take in to allow for itsinefficiency--and for your patents it has to give us a flat cut of itsgross! And meanwhile we'll get ours from the planets we've landed on andpublicized. We've got customers. We've built up a market for ourplanets!"

"Eh?" said Jones in frank astonishment. 

"We, " said Cochrane, "rate as first inhabitants and thereforeproprietors and governments of the first two planets ever landed onbeyond Earth. When the Moon-colony was formed, there were elaborate lawsmade to take care of surviving nation prides and so on. Whoever firststays on a planet a full rotation is its proprietor andgovernment--until other inhabitants arrive. Then the government is allof them, but the proprietorship remains with the first. We own twoplanets. Nice planets. Glamorized planets, too! So I've already madedeals for the hotel-concessions on the glacier world. "

Holden had listened with increasing uneasiness. Now he said doggedly:

"That's not right, Jed! I don't mind making money, but there are thingsthat are more important! Millions of people back home--hundreds ofmillions of poor devils--spend their lives scared to death of losingtheir jobs, not daring to hope for more than bare subsistence! I want todo something for them! People need hope, Jed, simply to be healthy!Maybe I'm a fool, but the human race needs hope more than I need money!"

Cochrane looked patient. 

"What would you suggest?"

"I think, " said Holden heavily, "that we ought to give what we've got tothe world. Let the governments of the world take over and assistemigration. There's not one but will be glad to do it . .. "

"Unfortunately, " said Cochrane, "you are perfectly right. They would!There have been resettlement projects and such stuff for generations. I'm very much afraid that just what you propose will be done to somedegree somewhere or other on other planets as they're turned up. But onthe glacier planet there will be hotels. The rich will want to go thereto stay, to sight-see, to ride, to hunt, to ski, and to fly inhelicopters over volcanoes. The hotels will need to be staffed. Therewill be guides and foresters and hunters. It will cost too much to bringfood from Earth, so farms will be started. It will be cheaper to buyfood from independent farmers than to raise it with hired help. So thefarmers will be independent. There will have to be stores to supply themwith what they need, and tourists with what they don't need but want. From the minute the glacier planet starts up as a tourist resort, therewill be jobs for hundreds of people. It won't be long before there arejobs for thousands. There'll be a man-shortage there. Anybody who wantsto can go there to work, and if he doesn't go there expecting acertified, psychologically conditioned environment, but just a good jobwith possible or probable advancement . .. That's the environment wehumans want! Presently the hotels won't even be tourist hotels. They'lljust be the normal hotels that exist everywhere that there are citiesand people moving about among them! Then it won't be a tourist-planet, and tourists will be a nuisance. It'll be home for one hell of a lot ofpeople! And they'll have made every bit of it themselves!"

Holden said uncomfortably:

"It'll be slow . .. "

"It'll be sure!" snapped Cochrane. "The first settlements in Americawere failures until the people started to work for themselves! Look atthis planet we're leaving! How many people will come to work that sillydiamond mine! How many will hunt to supply them with meat? How many willfarm to supply the hunters and the miners with other food? And how manyothers will be along to run stores and manufacture things . .. " He madean impatient gesture. "You're thinking of encouraging people to move tothe stars to make more room on Earth. You'd get nice passive colonistswho'd obediently move because the long-hairs said it was wise and thegovernment paid for it. I'm thinking of colonists who'll fight and quitepossibly cheat and lie a little to get jobs where they can take care oftheir families the way they want to! I want people to move to get whatthey want in spite of any discouragement anybody throws at them. Nowshoo! I'm busy!"

Jones asked mildly:

"At what?"

"The latest proposed deal, " said Cochrane impatiently, "is for rights tobore for oil. The uranium concessions are farmed out. Water-power ispending--not for cash, but a cut--and--. "

Holden said uneasily:

"There's one other thing, Jed. All your plans and all your schemingcould still be blocked if back on Earth they think we might bringplagues back to Earth. Remember Dabney suggested that? And somebiologist or other agreed with him?"

Cochrane grinned. 

"There's a diamond-mine. There are herds of what people will callcattle. There's food and riches. There's scenery and adventure. There'sroom to do things! Nobody could keep political office if he tried tokeep his constituents from food and cash and adventure--even by proxywhen they send expendable Cousin Albert out to see if he can make aliving there. We've got to take reasonable precautions against germs, ofcourse. We'll have trouble enforcing them. But we'll manage!"

Al called down from the control-room. The ship was sufficiently aligned, he thought, for their next stopping-place. He wanted Jones to charge thebooster-circuit and flash it over. Jones went. 

A little later there was the peculiar sensation of a sound that was nota sound, but was felt all through one. The result was not satisfactory. The ship was still in empty space, and the nearest star was still astar. There was a repetition of the booster-jump. Still not too good. Thereafter the ship drove, and jumped, and jumped, and drove. 

Jamison came down to where Cochrane conducted business via communicator. He waited. Cochrane said:

"Dammit, I won't agree! I want twelve per cent or I take up anotheroffer!--What?"

The last was to Jamison. Jamison said uneasily:

"We found another planet. About Earth-size. Ice-caps. Clouds. Oceans. Seas. Even rivers! But there's no green on it! It's all bare rocks!"

Cochrane thought concentratedly. Then he said impatiently:

"The whiskered people back home said that life couldn't have gottenstarted on all the planets suited for it. They said there must beplanets where life hasn't reached, though they're perfectly suited forit. Make a landing and try the air with algae like we did on the firstplanet. "

He turned back to the communicator. 

"You reason, " he snapped to a man on far-away Earth, "that all this isonly on paper. But that's the only reason you're getting a chance at it!I'll guarantee that Jones will install drives on ships that meet ourrequirements of space-worthiness--or government standards, whichever arestrictest--for ten per cent of your company stock plus twelve per centcash of the cost of each ship. Nothing less!"

He heard the rockets make the louder sound that was the symptom ofdescent against gravity. 

The world was lifeless. The ship had landed on bare stone, when Cochranelooked out the control-room ports. There had been trouble finding a flatspace on which the three landing-fins would find a suitable foundation. It had taken half an hour of maneuvering to locate such a place and tosettle solidly on it. Then the look of things was appalling. 

The landing-spot was a naked mass of what seemed to be basalt polygons, similar to the Giants' Causeway of Ireland back on Earth. There was nosoftness anywhere. The stone which on other planets underlay soil, hereshowed harshly. There was no soil. There was no microscopic life tonibble at rocks and make soil in which less minute life could live. Thenudity of the stones led to glaring colors everywhere. The colors werebrilliant as nowhere else but on Earth's moon. There was no vegetationat all. 

That was somehow shocking. The ship's company stared and stared, butthere could be no comment. There was a vast, dark sea to the left of thelanding-place. Inland there were mountains and valleys. But themountains were not sloped. There were heaps of detritus at the bases oftheir cliffs, but it was simply detritus. No tiniest patch of lichengrew anywhere. No blade of grass. No moss. No leaf. Nothing. 

The air was empty. Nothing flew. There were clouds, to be sure. The skywas even blue, though a darker blue than Earth's, because there was novegetation to break stone down to dust, or to form dust by its owndecay. 

The sea was violently active. Great waves flung themselves toward theharsh coastline and beat upon it with insensate violence. They shatteredinto masses of foam. But the foam broke--too quickly--and left thesurging water dark again. Far down the line of foam there were darkclouds, and rain fell in masses, and lightning flashed. But it was ascene of desolation which was somehow more horrible even than thescarred and battered moon of Earth. 

Cochrane looked out very carefully. Alicia came to him, a triflehesitant. 

"Johnny's asleep now. He didn't sleep at first, and while we were out ofgravity he was unhappy. But he went off to sleep the instant we landed. He needs rest. Could we--just stay landed here until he catches up onsleep?"

Cochrane nodded. Alicia smiled at him and went away. There was still themark of a bruise on her cheek. She went down to where her husband neededher. Holden said dourly:

"This world's useless. So is her husband. "

"Wait till we check the air, " said Cochrane absently. 

"I've checked it, " Holden told him indifferently. "I went in the portand sniffed at the cracked outer door. I didn't die, so I opened thedoor. There is a smell of stone. That's all. The air's perfectlybreathable. The ocean's probably absorbed all soluble gases, andpoisonous gases are soluble. If they weren't, they couldn't bepoisonous. "

"Mmmmmm, " said Cochrane thoughtfully. 

Jamison came over to him. 

"We're not going to stay here, are we?" he asked. "I don't like to lookat it. The moon's bad enough, but at least nothing could live there!Anything could live here. But it doesn't! I don't like it!"

"We'll stay here at least while Johnny has a nap. I do want Bell to takeall the pictures he can, though. Probably not for broadcast, but forbusiness reasons. I'll need pictures to back up a deal. "

Jamison went away. Holden said without interest:

"You'll make no deals with this planet! This is one you can do what youlike with! I don't want any part of it!"

Cochrane shrugged. 

"Speaking of things you don't want any part of--what about Johnny Simms?Speaking as a psychiatrist, what effect will that business of being inthe dark all night and nearly being pecked to death--what will it do tohim? Are psychopaths the way they are because they can't face reality, or because they've never had to?"

Holden stared away down the incredible, lifeless coastline at thedistant storm. There was darkness under many layers of cloud. The seafoamed and lashed and instantly was free of foam again. Because therewere no plankton, no animalcules, no tiny, gluey, organic beings in itto give the water the property of making foam which endured. There wasthunder, yonder in the storm, and no ear heard it. Over a vast worldthere was sunshine which no eyes saw. There was night in which nothingrested, and somewhere dawn was breaking now, and nothing sang. 

"Look at that, Jed, " said Holden heavily. "There's a reality none of uswants to face! We're all more or less fugitives from what we are afraidis reality. That is real, and it makes me feel small and futile. So Idon't like to look at it. Johnny Simms didn't want to face what one doesgrow up to face. It made him feel futile. So he picked a pleasanter rolethan realist. "

Cochrane nodded. 

"But his unrealism of last night put him into a very realistic mess thathe couldn't dodge! Will it change him?"

"Probably, " said Holden without any expression at all in his voice. "They used to put lunatics in snake-pits. When they were people who'dtaken to lunacy for escape from reality, it made them go back to realityto escape from the snakes. Shock-treatments used to be used, later, forthe same effect. We're too soft to use either treatment now. But Johnnygave himself the works. The odds are that from now on he will never wantto be alone even for an instant, and he will never again quite dare tobe angry with anybody or make anybody angry. You choked him and he ranaway, and it was bad! So from now on I'd guess that Johnny will be avery well-behaved little boy in a grown man's body. " He said very wrylyindeed, "Alicia will be very happy, taking care of him. "

A moment later he added:

"I look at that set-up the way I look at the landscape yonder. "

Cochrane said nothing. Holden liked Alicia. Too much. It would not makeany difference at all. After a moment, though, he changed the subject. 

"I think this is a pretty good bet, this planet. You think it's no good. I'm going to talk to the chlorella companies. They grow edible yeast intanks, and chlorella in vats, and they produce an important amount offood. But they have to grow the stuff indoors and they have a ghastlyjob keeping everything sterile. Here's a place where they can sowchlorella in the oceans! They can grow yeast in lakes, out-of-doors!Suppose they use this world to grow monstrous quantities of unattractivebut useful foodstuff--in a way--wild? It will be good return-cargomaterial for ships taking colonists out to our other planets. --Isuppose, " he added meditatively, "they'll ship it back in bulk, dried. "

Holden blinked. He was jolted out of even his depression. 

"Jed!" he said warmly. "Tell that to the world--prove that--and--peoplewill stop being afraid! They won't be afraid of starving before they canget to the stars! Jed--Jed! This is the thing the world needs most ofall!"

But Cochrane grimaced. 

"Maybe, " he admitted it. "But I've tasted the stuff. I think it's foul!Still, if people want it . .. "

He went back down to the communicator to contact the chlorella companiesof Earth, to find out if there was any special data they would need topass on the proposal. 

 * * * * *

And so presently the ship took off for home. It landed on the moonfirst, and Johnny Simms was loaded into a space-suit and transferred toLunar City, where he could live without being extradited back to Earth. He wouldn't stay there. Alicia guaranteed that. They'd move to theglacier planet as soon as hotels were built. Maybe some day they'dtravel to the planet of the shaggy beasts. Johnny would never betroublesome again. He was pathetically anxious, now, to have people likehim, and stay with him, and not under any circumstances be angry withhim or shut him away from them. Alicia would now have a full-timeoccupation keeping people from taking advantage of him. 

But the ship went back to Earth. And on Earth Jamison became the leadingtelevision personality of all time, describing and extrapolating thedelicious dangers and the splendid industrial opportunities ofstar-travel. Bell was his companion and co-star. Presently Jamisonconceded privately to Cochrane that he and Bell would need shortly totake off on another journey of exploration with some other expedition. Neither of them thought to retire, though they were well-off enough. They were stock-holders in the Spaceways company, which guaranteed thema living. 

Cochrane put Spaceways, Inc. , into full operation. He fought savagelyagainst personal publicity, but he worked himself half to death. Hespent hours every day in frenzied haggling, and in the cynicalexamination of deftly booby-trapped business proposals. His lawyersinsisted that he needed an office--he did--and presently he had foursecretaries and there developed an entire hierarchy of persons underhim. One day his chief secretary told him commiseratingly that somebodyhad waited two hours past appointment-time to see him. 

It was Hopkins, who had not been willing to interrupt his dinner tolisten to a protest from Cochrane. Hopkins was still exactly asimportant as ever. It was only that Cochrane was more so. 

It woke Cochrane up. He stormed, to Babs, and ruthlessly cancelledappointments and abandoned or transferred enterprises, and madepreparations for a more satisfactory way of life. 

They went, in time, to the Spaceways terminal, to take ship for thestars. The terminal was improvised, but it was busy. Already eighteenships a day went away from there in Dabney fields. Eighteen othersarrived. Jones was already off somewhere in a ship built according tohis own notions. Officially he was doing research for Spaceways, Inc. , but actually nobody told him what to do. He puttered happily withimprobable contrivances and sometimes got even more improbable results. Holden was already off of Earth. He was on the planet of the shaggybeasts, acting as consultant on the cases of persons who arrived thereand became emotionally disturbed because they could do as they pleased, instead of being forced by economic necessity to do otherwise. 

But this day Babs and Cochrane went together into the grand concourse ofthe Spaceways terminal. There were people everywhere. The hiring-boothsof enterprises on the three planets now under development tookapplications for jobs on those remote worlds, and explained how long onehad to contract to work in order to have one's fare paid. Chambers ofCommerce representatives were prepared to give technical information toprospective entrepreneurs. There were reservation-desks, andfreight-routing desks, and tourist-agency desks . .. 

"Hmmm, " said Cochrane suddenly. "D'you know, I haven't heard of Dabneyin months! What happened to him?"

"Dabney?" said Babs. She beamed. Women in the terminal saw the clothesshe was wearing. They did not recognize her--Cochrane had kept her offthe air--but they envied her. She felt very nice indeed. "Dabney?--Oh, Ihad to use my own judgment there, Jed. You were so busy! After all, hewas scientific consultant to Spaceways. He did pay Jones cold cash forfame-rights. When everything else got so much more important than justthe scientific theory, he got in a terrible state. His family consultedDoctor Holden, and we arranged it. He's right down this way!"

She pointed. And there was a splendid plate-glass office built out fromthe wall of the grand concourse. It was elevated, so that it wascharmingly conspicuous. There was a chastely designed but highly visiblesign under the stairway leading to it. The sign said; "_H. G. Dabney, Scientific Consultant. _"

Dabney sat at an imposing desk in plain view of all the thousands whohad shipped out and the millions who would ship out in time to come. Hethought, visibly. Presently he stood up and paced meditatively up anddown the office which was as eye-catching as a gold-fish bowl of equalsize in the same place. He seemed to see someone down in the concourse. He could have recognized Cochrane, of course. But he did not. 

He bowed. He was a great man. Undoubtedly he returned to his wife eachevening happily convinced that he had done the world a great favor bypermitting it to glimpse him. 

Cochrane and Babs went on. Their baggage was taken care of. Thedeparture of a ship for the stars, these days, was much less complicatedand vastly more comfortable than it used to be when a mere moon-rockettook off. 

When they were in the ship, Babs heaved a sigh of absolute relief. 

"Now, " she said zestfully, "now you're retired, Jed! You don't have toworry about anything! And so now I'm going to try to make you worryabout me--not worry about me, but think about me!"

"Of course, " said Cochrane. He regarded her with honest affection. "We'll take a good long vacation. First on the glacier planet. Thenwe'll build a house somewhere in the hills back of Diamondville . .. "

"Jed!" said Babs accusingly. 

"There's a fair population there already, " said Cochrane, apologetically. "It won't be long before a local television station willbe logical. I was just thinking, Babs, that after we get bored withloafing, I could start a program there. Really sound stuff. Notcommercial. And of course with the Dabney field it could be piped backto Earth if any sponsor wanted it. I think they would . .. "

Presently the ship with Babs and Cochrane among its passengers took offto the stars. It was a perfectly routine flight. After all, star-travelwas almost six months old. It wasn't a novelty any longer. 

Operation Outer Space was old stuff. 

THE END. 

 * * * * *

Transcriber's notes

The following typos have been corrected. Hyphenation adjusted to reflectthe most common usage in the text. 

Page Typo Correction7 expendible expendable8 calmy calmly8 Takeoff's Take-off's9 Takeoff Take-off10 night-club nightclub13 business-like businesslike21 takeoff take-off25 moonjeep moon-jeep25 The pyschiatrist The psychiatrist27 buisinesslike businesslike33 Appenines Apennines36 Arcturis Arcturus37 Why? Why?"39 tryin trying40 stockholders stock-holders41 possiblities possibilities56 Columbus', Columbus'57 Three of four Three or four77 moonrocket moon-rocket86 epidomologist epidemiologist89 "Why? "Why?"91 wrily wryly93 chlorophyl chlorophyll95 panic-striken panic-stricken101 roup croup109 Cochrone Cochrane110 behind behind besides115 wrily wryly117 'We'd have "We'd have118 back-ground background120 sun-light sunlight120 'We're in a "We're in a125 virtures virtues125 normal normal, 129 maintainance maintenance135 extraterrestrial extra-terrestrial136 collossus colossus137 facsimilie facsimile142 eveywhere everywhere143 star-ships starships

The following differently hyphenated words have been left as they were, since there was no clearly predominant usage. 

air-lock airlockfood-stuff foodstuffsice-caps icecapsmoon-dust moondustre-broadcast rebroadcastroof-tops rooftopsside-rail siderailspace-ship spaceshiptree-tops treetopsultra-violet ultraviolet

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