The rocket vanished.

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

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

The m.u.f.fled voice in the helmet-phones said blankly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Jones, what speed would that be?"

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

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

The voice from the observatory wailed:

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

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

Which was starkly impossible. It simply happened to be true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jones said meditatively:

"I'm wondering what sort of field-strength a capacity-storage system would give me. I boosted the field intensity this time. The results were pretty good. I'm thinking--suppose I made the field with a strobe-light power-pack--or maybe a spot-welding unit. Even a portable strobe-light gives a couple of million watts for the forty-thousandth of a second.

Suppose I fixed up a storage-pack to give me a field with a few billion watts in it? It might be practically like matter-transmission, though it would really be only high-speed travel. I think I've got to work on that idea a little ..."

Cochrane digested the information in silence.

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

Holden said moodily:

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

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

"Consider that part settled."

"But there are supplies. Air--water--food--a crew--. We can't pay for such things! Here on the moon the cost of everything is preposterous!

How can you try out this idea without more capital than you can possibly raise?"

"I'm going to imitate my old friend Christopher Columbus," said Cochrane. "I'm going to give the customers what they want. Columbus didn't try to sell anybody shares in new continents. Who wanted new continents? Who wanted to move to a new world? Who wants new planets now? Everybody would like to see their neighbors move away and leave more room, but n.o.body wants to move himself. Columbus sold a promise of something that had an already-established value, that could be sold in every town and village--that had a merchandising system already set up!

I'm going to offer just such a marketable commodity. I'll have freight-rockets on the way up here within twenty-four hours, and the freight and their contents will all be paid for!"

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER FOUR

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

There was a four-second pause. About two seconds for his voice to reach Earth. About two seconds for the beginning of the reply to reach him.

The man at the other end protested wildly.

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

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

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

He yawned.