“You paint a dark picture, Bill.  Are you trying to make this thing into a challenge?”

“You can’t make a man famous for discovering something that doesn’t matter,” said Holden hopelessly.  “And this is that!”

“Nothing’s impossible to public relations if you spend enough money,” Cochrane assured him.  “What’s this useless triumph of his?”

The jeep bounced over a small cliff and fell gently for half a second and rolled on.  Babs beamed.

“He’s found,” said Holden discouragedly, “a way to send messages faster than light.  It’s a detour around Einstein’s stuff—­not denying it, but evading it.  Right now it takes not quite two seconds for a message to go from the moon to Earth.  That’s at the speed of light.  Dabney has proof—­we’ll see it—­that he can cut that down some ninety-five per cent.  Only it can’t be used for Earth-moon communication, because both ends have to be in a vacuum.  It could be used to the space platform, but—­what’s the difference?  It’s a real discovery for which there’s no possible use.  There’s no place to send messages to!”

Cochrane’s eyes grew bright and hard.  There were some three thousand million suns in the immediate locality of Earth—­and more only a relatively short distance way—­and it had not mattered to anybody.  The situation did not seem likely to change.  But—­The moon-jeep climbed and climbed.  It was a mile above the bay of the lava sea and the dust-heaps that were a city.  It looked like ten miles, because of the curve of the horizon.  The mountains all about looked like a madman’s dream.

“But he wants appreciation!” said Holden angrily.  “People on Earth almost trampling on each other for lack of room, and people like me trying to keep them sane when they’ve every reason for despair—­and he wants appreciation!”

Cochrane grinned.  He whistled softly.

“Never underestimate a genius, Bill,” he said kindly.  “I refer modestly to myself.  In two weeks your patient—­I’ll guarantee it—­will be acclaimed the hope, the blessing, the greatest man in all the history of humanity!  It’ll be phoney, of course, but we’ll have Marilyn Winters—­Little Aphrodite herself—­making passes at him in hopes of a publicity break!  It’s a natural!”

“How’ll you do it?” demanded Holden.

The moon-jeep turned in its crazy, bumping progress.  A flat area had been blasted in rock which had been unchanged since the beginning of time.  Here there was a human structure.  Typically, it was a dust-heap leaning against a cliff.  There was an airlock and another jeep waited outside, and there were eccentric metal devices on the flat space, shielded from direct sunshine and with cables running to them from the airlock door.

“How?” repeated Cochrane.  “I’ll get the details here.  Let’s go!  How do we manage?”

It was a matter, he discovered, of vacuum-suits, and they were tricky to get into and felt horrible when one was in.  Struggling, Cochrane thought to say: