nd Cochrane felt queer. Jones had given the order for take-off. Jones
had determined to leave at this moment, because Jones had tests he
wanted to make.... Cochrane felt like a passenger. From the man who
decided things because he was the one who knew what had to be done, he
had become something else. He had been absent two nights and part of a
day, 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," observed
Jones 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 between
the 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 field
stretched from the bow of the ship only, out to that last balloon we
dropped. We were letting down at an angle to that line. It was like a
kite 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 unlike
Dabney. Jones had discovered the Dabney field, but having sold the
fame-rights to it, he now apparently thought "Dabney Field" was the
proper 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 field
once established would hold in atmosphere. I hoped that with enough
power I could keep it, but I wasn't sure--"

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

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

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

"So what happens?"

"We have both plates of a Dabney field always with us," said Jones
triumphantly. "We're