There was another precedent he did not intend to follow.  Columbus did not know where he was going when he set sail, he did not know where he was when he arrived at the end of his voyage, and he didn’t know where he’d been when he got back.  Cochrane expected to improve on the achievement of the earlier explorer’s doings in these respects.

He commandeered the legal department of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins, and Fallowe to set up the enterprise with strict legality and discretion.  There came into being a corporation called “Spaceways, Inc.” which could not possibly be considered phoney from any inspection of its charter.  Expert legal advice arranged that its actual stock-holders should appear to be untraceable.  Deft manipulation contrived that though its stock was legally vested in Cochrane and Holden and Jones—­Cochrane negligently threw in Jones as a convenient name to use—­and they were officially the owners of nearly all the stock, nobody who checked up would believe they were anything but dummies.  Stockholdings in West’s, and Jamison’s and Bell’s names would look like smaller holdings held for other than the main entrepreneurs.  But these stock-holders were not only the legal owners of record—­they were the true owners.  Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe wanted no actual part of Spaceways.  They considered the enterprise merely a psychiatric treatment for a neurotic son-in-law.  Which, of course, it was.  So Spaceways, Inc., quite honestly and validly belonged to the people who would cure Dabney of his frustration—­and nobody at all believed that it would ever do anything else.  Not anybody but those six owners, anyhow.  And as it turned out, not all of them.

The psychiatric treatment began with an innocent-seeming news-item from Lunar City saying that Dabney, the so-and-so scientist, had consented to act as consulting physicist to Spaceways, Inc., for the practical application of his recent discovery of a way to send messages faster than light.

This was news simply because it came from the moon.  It got fairly wide distribution, but no emphasis.

Then the publicity campaign broke.  On orders from Cochrane, Jamison the extrapolating genius got slightly plastered, in company with the two news-association reporters in Lunar City.  He confided that Spaceways, Inc., had been organized and was backed to develop the Dabney faster-than-light-signalling field into a faster-than-light-travel field.  The news men pumped him of all his extrapolations.  Cynically, they checked to see who might be preparing to unload stock.  They found no preparations for stock-sales.  No registration of the company for raising funds.  It wasn’t going to the public for money.  It wasn’t selling anybody anything.  Then Cochrane refused to see any reporters at all, everybody connected with the enterprise shut up tighter than a clam, and Jamison vanished into a hotel room where he was kept occupied with beverages and food at Dabney’s father-in-law’s expense.  None of this was standard for a phoney promotion deal.