“It’s blackmail,” said Cochrane without heat.  “A pretty neat job of it, too.  Babs, you see Holden about this.  He’s a psychiatrist.”  He turned to Alicia.  “Why do you want to go?  I don’t know whether it’ll be dangerous or not.”

“I married Johnny,” said Alicia.  Her smile was composed.  “I thought it would be wonderful to be able to trust somebody that nobody else could trust.”  After a moment she added:  “It would be, if one could.”

A few moments later she went away, very pleasantly and very calmly.  Her husband had no sense of right or wrong—­not in action, anyhow.  She tried to keep him from doing too much damage by exercising the knowledge she had of what was fair and what was not.  Cochrane grimaced and told Babs to make a note to talk to Holden.  But there were other matters on hand, too.  There were waivers to be signed by everybody who went along off Luna.  Then Cochrane said thoughtfully: 

“Alicia Keith would be a good name for film-tape ...”

He plunged into the mess of paper-work and haggling which somebody has to do before any achievement of consequence can come about.  Pioneer efforts, in particular, require the same sort of clearing-away process as the settling of a frontier farm.  Instead of trees to be chopped and dug up by the roots, there are the gratuitous obstructionists who have to be chopped off at the ankles in a business way, and the people who exercise infinite ingenuity trying to get a cut of something—­anything—­somebody else is doing.  And of course there are the publicity-hounds.  Since Spaceways was being financed on sales of publicity which could be turned on this product and that, publicity-hounds cut into its revenue and capital.

Back on Earth a crackpot inventor had a lawyer busily garnering free advertisement by press conferences about the injury done his client by Spaceways, Inc., who had stolen his invention to travel through space faster than light.  Somebody in the Senate made a speech accusing the Spaceway project of being a political move by the party in power for some dire ultimate purpose.

Ultimately the crackpot inventor would get on the air and announce triumphantly that only part of his invention had been stolen, because he’d been too smart to write it down or tell anybody, and he wouldn’t tell anybody—­not even a court—­the full details of his invention unless paid twenty-five million in cash down, and royalties afterward.  The project for a congressional investigation of Spaceways would die in committee.

But there were other griefs.  The useless spaceship hulk had to be emptied of the mining-tools stored in it.  This was done by men working in space-suits.  Occupational rules required them to exert not more than one-fourth of the effort they would have done if working for themselves.  When the ship was empty, air was released in it, and immediately froze to air-snow.  So radiant heaters had to be installed and powered to warm up the hull to where an atmosphere could exist in it.  Its generators had to be thawed from the metal-ice stage of brittleness and warmed to where they could be run without breaking themselves to bits.