“A signal-rocket has an acceleration of about six hundred feet per second, level flight, no gravity component, mass acceleration only.  It should have taken a hundred seconds plus to cross that crater—­over twenty miles.  It shouldn’t have stayed on course.  It did stay on course, inside the field.  It did take under three-fifths of a second.  The gadget works!”

Holden drew a deep breath.

“So now you need more money and you want me not to discharge my patient as cured.”

“Not a bit of it!” snapped Cochrane.  “I don’t want him as a patient!  I’m only willing to accept him as a customer!  But if he wants fame, I’ll sell it to him.  Not as something to lean his fragile psyche on, but something to wallow in!  Do you think he could ever get too famous for his own satisfaction?”

“Of course not,” said Holden.  “He’s the same fool.”

“Then we’re in business,” Cochrane told him.  “Not that I couldn’t peddle my fish elsewhere.  I’m going to!  But I’ll give him old-customer preference.  I’ll want him out at the distress-torp tests this afternoon.  They’ll be public.”

“This afternoon?” asked Holden.  “Distress-torp?”

A lunar day is two Earth-weeks-long.  A lunar night is equally long-drawn-out.  Cochrane said impatiently: 

“I got out of bed four hours ago.  To me that’s morning.  I’ll eat lunch in an hour.  That’s noon.  Say, three hours from now, whatever o’clock it is lunar time.”

Holden glanced at his watch and made computations.  He said: 

“That’ll be half-past two hundred and three o’clock, if you’re curious.  But what’s a distress-torp?”

“Shoo!” said Cochrane.  “I’ll send Babs to find you and load you on the jeep.  You’ll see then.  Now I’m busy!”

Holden shrugged and went away, and Cochrane stared at his own watch.  Since a lunar day and night together fill twenty-eight Earth days of time, a strictly lunar “day” contains nearly three hundred forty Earth-hours.  To call one-twelfth of that period an hour would be an affectation.  To call each twenty-four Earth hours a day would have been absurd.  So the actual period of the moon’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.