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 immediatel
y 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 di
scovery! 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 signa
l 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!"