s rotation was divided into
familiar time-intervals, and a bulletin-board in the hotel lobby in
Lunar City notified those interested that: "_Sunday will be from 143
o'clock to 167 o'clock A.M._" There would be another Sunday some time
during the lunar afternoon.

Cochrane debated momentarily whether this information could be used in
the publicity campaign of Spaceways, Inc. Strictly speaking, there was
some 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, were
technically incidental. But Cochrane put his watch away. To talk about
horology on the moon wouldn't add to Dabney's stature as a phoney
scientist. It didn't matter.

He went back to the business at hand. Some two years before there had
been a fake corporation organized strictly for the benefit of its
promoters. It had built a rocket-ship ostensibly for the establishment
of a colony on Mars. The ship had managed to stagger up to Luna, but no
farther. Its promoters had sold stock on the promise that a ship that
could barely reach Luna could take off from that small globe with six
times as much fuel as it could lift off of Earth. Which was true.
Investors put in their money on that verifiable fact. But the truth
happened to be, of course, that it would still take an impossible amount
of fuel to accelerate the ship--so heavily loaded--to a speed where it
would reach Mars in one human lifetime. Taking off from Luna would solve
only the problem of gravity. It wouldn't do a thing about inertia. So
the ship never rose from its landing near Lunar City. The corporation
that had built it went profitably bankrupt.

Cochrane had been working feverishly to find out who owned that ship
now. Just before the torp-test he'd mentioned, he found that the ship
belonged to the hotel desk-clerk, who had bought it in hope of renting
it sooner or later for television background-shots in case anybody was
crazy enough to make a television film-tape on the moon. He was now
discouraged. Cochrane chartered it, putting up a bond to return it
undamaged. If the ship was lost, the hotel-clerk would get back his
investment--about a week's pay.

So Cochrane had a space-ship practically in his pocket when the public
demonstration of the Dabney field came off at half-past 203 o'clock.

The site of the demonstration was the shadowed, pitch-dark pa