hich was
like a glamour; a fey and eerie veiling which made Earth a sight to draw
at one's heart-strings.

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

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

And then there was the interior of the laboratory. It was not wholly
familiar even to Cochrane, who had used sets on the Dikkipatti Hour of
most of the locations in which human dramas can unfold. This was a
physics laboratory, pure and simple. The air smelled of ozone and
spilled acid and oil and food and tobacco-smoke and other items. West
and Jamison were already here, their space-suits removed. They sat
before beer at a table with innumerable diagrams scattered about. There
was a deep-browed man rather impatiently turning to face his new
visitors.

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

Cochrane saw Jones' expression flicker sarcastically just once during
Holden'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 an
explanation, because he would translate everything into televisable
terms.

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

"Cut," said Cochrane.

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

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