But there were good breaks, too.  Presently a former moonship-pilot—­grounded to an administrative job on Luna—­on his own free time checked over the ship.  Jones arranged it.  With rocket-motors of adamite—­the stuff discovered by pure accident in a steel-mill back on Earth—­the propelling apparatus checked out.  The fuel-pumps had been taken over in fullness of design from fire-engine pumps on Earth.  They were all right.  The air-regenerating apparatus had been developed from the aeriating culture-tanks in which antibiotics were grown on Earth.  It needed only reseeding with algae—­microscopic plants which when supplied with ultraviolet light fed avidly on carbon dioxide and yielded oxygen.  The ship was a rather involved combination of essentially simple devices.  It could be put back into such workability as it had once possessed with practically no trouble.

It was.

Jones moved into it, with masses of apparatus from the laboratory in the Lunar Apennines.  He labored lovingly, fanatically.  Like most spectacular discoveries, the Dabney field was basically simple.  It was almost idiotically uncomplicated.  In theory it was a condition of the space just outside one surface of a sheet of metal.  It was like that conduction-layer on the wires of a cross-country power-cable, when electricity is transmitted in the form of high-frequency alterations and travels on the skins of many strands of metal, because high-frequency current simply does not flow inside of wires, but only on their surfaces.  The Dabney field formed on the surface—­or infinitesimally beyond it—­of a metal sheet in which eddy-currents were induced in such-and-such a varying fashion.  That was all there was to it.

So Jones made the exterior forward surface of the abandoned spaceship into a generator of the Dabney field.  It was not only simple, it was too simple!  Having made the bow of the ship into a Dabney field plate, he immediately arranged that he could, at will, make the rear of the ship into another Dabney field plate.  The two plates, turned on together, amounted to something that could be contemplated with startled awe, but Jones planned to start off, at least, in a manner exactly like the distress-torp test.  The job of wiring up for faster-than-light travel, however, was not much more difficult than wiring a bungalow, when one knew how it should be done.

Two freight-rockets came in, picked up by radar and guided to landings by remote control.  The Lunar City beam receiver picked up music aimed up from Earth and duly relayed it to the dust-heaps which were the buildings of the city.  The colonists and moon-tourists became familiar with forty-two new tunes dealing with prospective travel to the stars.  One work of genius tied in a just-released film-tape drama titled “Child of Hate” to the Lunar operation, and charmed listeners saw and heard the latest youthful tenor gently plead, “Child of Hate, Come to the Stars and Love.” The publicity department responsible for the masterpiece considered itself not far from genius, too.