“Too bad—­if he has millions,” said Cochrane.

“I wouldn’t marry a man with a psychopathic personality!” protested Babs.

“Keep away from people in the advertising business, then,” Cochrane told her.

Johnny Simms did not jounce up and down on the diving board to start.  He simply leaped upward, and went ceilingward for easily fifteen feet, and hung stationary for a full breath, and then began to descend in literal slow motion.  He fell only two and a half feet the first second, and five feet more the one after, and twelve and a half after that....  It took him over four seconds to drop forty-five feet into the water, and the splash that arose when he struck the surface rose four yards and subsided with a lunatic deliberation.

Watching, Babs could not keep her businesslike demeanor.  She was bursting with the joyous knowledge that she was on the moon, seeing the impossible and looking at fame.

They sipped at drinks—­but the liquid rose much too swiftly in the straws—­and Cochrane reflected that the drink in Babs’ glass would cost Dabney’s father-in-law as much as Babs earned in a week back home, and his own was costing no less.

Presently a written note came from Holden: 

“Jed:  send West and Jamison right away to Dabney’s lunar laboratory to get details of discovery from man named Jones.  Get moon-jeep and driver from hotel.  I will want you in an hour.—­Bill.”

“I’ll be back,” said Cochrane.  “Wait.”

He left the table and found West and Jamison in Bell’s room, all three in conference over a bottle.  West and Jamison were Cochrane’s scientific team for the yet unformulated task he was to perform.  West was the popularizing specialist.  He could make a television audience believe that it understood all the seven dimensions required for some branches of wave-mechanics theory.  His explanation did not stick, of course.  One didn’t remember them.  But they were singularly convincing in cultural episodes on television productions.  Jamison was the prophecy expert.  He could extrapolate anything into anything else, and make you believe that a one-week drop in the birthdate on Kamchatka was the beginning of a trend that would leave the Earth depopulated in exactly four hundred and seventy-three years.  They were good men for a television producer to have on call.  Now, instructed, they went out to be briefed by somebody who undoubtedly knew more than both of them put together, but whom they would regard with tolerant suspicion.

Bell, left behind, said cagily: 

“This script I’ve got to do, now—­Will that laboratory be the set?  Where is it?  In the dome?”

“It’s not in the dome,” Cochrane told him.  “West and Jamison took a moon-jeep to get to it.  I don’t know what the set will be.  I don’t know anything, yet.  I’m waiting to be told about the job, myself.”

“If I’ve got to cook up a story-line,” observed Bell, “I have to know the set.  Who’ll act?  You know how amateurs can ham up any script!  How about a part for Babs?  Nice kid!”