Holden escorted him away, while Cochrane carefully controlled his features.  After a few moments Holden came back, his face sagging.

“This your drink, Jed?” he asked dispiritedly.  “I need it!” He picked up the glass and emptied it.  “The history of that case would be interesting, if one could really get to the bottom of it!  Come along!” His tone was dreariness itself.  “I’ve got a jeep waiting for us.”

Babs stood up, her eyes shining.

“May I come, Mr. Cochrane?”

Cochrane waved her along.  Holden tried to stalk gloomily, but nobody can stalk in one-sixth gravity.  He reeled, and then depressedly accommodated himself to conditions on the moon.

There was an airlock with a smaller edition of the moon-jeep that had brought them from the ship to the city.  It was a brightly-polished metal body, raised some ten feet off the ground on outrageously large wheels.  It was very similar to the straddle-trucks used in lumberyards on Earth.  It would straddle boulders in its path.  It could go anywhere in spite of dust and detritus, and its metal body was air-tight and held air for breathing, even out on the moon’s surface.

They climbed in.  There was the sound of pumping, which grew fainter.  The outer lock-door opened.  The moon-jeep rolled outside.

Babs stared with passionate rapture out of a shielded port.  There were impossibly jagged stones, preposterously steep cliffs.  There had been no weather to remove the sharp edge of anything in a hundred million years.  The awkward-seeming vehicle trundled over the lava sea toward the rampart of mighty mountains towering over Lunar City.  It reached a steep ascent.  It climbed.  And the way was remarkably rough and the vehicle springless, but it was nevertheless a cushioned ride.  A bump cannot be harsh in light gravity.  The vehicle rode as if on wings.

“All right,” said Cochrane.  “Tell me the worst.  What’s the trouble with him?  Is he the result of six generations of keeping the money in the family?  Or is he a freak?”

Holden groaned a little.

“He’s practically a stock model of a rich young man without brains enough for a job in the family firm, and too much money for anything else.  Fortunately for his family, he didn’t react like Johnny Simms—­though they’re good friends.  A hundred years ago, Dabney’d have gone in for the arts.  But it’s hard to fool yourself that way now.  Fifty years ago he’d have gone in for left-wing sociology.  But we really are doing the best that can be done with too many people and not enough world.  So he went in for science.  It’s non-competitive.  Incapacity doesn’t show up.  But he has stumbled on something.  It sounds really important.  It must have been an accident!  The only trouble is that it doesn’t mean a thing!  Yet because he’s accomplished more than he ever expected to, he’s frustrated because it’s not appreciated!  What a joke!”

Cochrane said cynically: