--at seven-eighths of the speed of light. Between
the flat cone on the front of the distress-torpedo, and the flat cone on
the ground, a field of force existed. The field was not on the back
surface of the torpedo's cone, but before the front surface. It went
back to the moon from there, so all the torpedo and its batteries were
in the columnar stressed space. And an amount of rocket-push that should
have sent the four-foot torpedo maybe twenty miles 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 space. There would be a practical limit to the speed at which a
wagon could be drawn over a rough road. The speed of light was a limit
to the speed of matter in normal space. But on a railway the practical
speed at which a vehicle could travel went up from three miles an hour
to a hundred and twenty. In the Dabney field it was yet to be discovered
what the limiting velocity might be. But old formulas for acceleration
and increase-of-mass-with-velocity simply did not apply in a Dabney
field.

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

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

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

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

The small moon-jeep rolled and bumped gently down the long, improbable
highway back to Lunar City. Its engine ran smoothly, as steam-engines
always do. It ran on seventy per cent hydrogen peroxide, first developed
as a fuel back in the 1940s for the pumps of the V2 rockets that tried
to win the Second World War for Germany. When hydrogen peroxide comes in
contact with a cata