Cochrane did not notice her tone.  He was dead-tired, as only a man can be who has driven himself at top speed for days on end over a business deal.  Business deals are stimulating only in their major aspects.  Most of the details are niggling, tedious, routine, and boring—­and very often bear-trapped.  Cochrane had done, with only Babs’ help, an amount of mental labor that in the offices of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe would have been divided among two vice-presidents, six lawyers, and at least twelve account executives.  The work, therefore, would actually have been done by not less than twenty secretaries.  But Babs and Cochrane had done it all.

In the moon-jeep on the way to the ship he felt that heavy, exhausted sense of relaxation which is not pleasurable at all.  Babs annoyed him a little, too.  She was late getting to the airlock, and seemed breathless when she arrived.

The moon-jeep crunched and clanked and rumbled over the gently undulating lava sea beneath its giant wheels.  Babs looked zestfully out of the windows.  The picture was, of course, quite incredible.  In the relatively dim Earthlight the moonscape was somehow softened, and yet the impossibly jagged mountains and steep cliffsides and the razor-edged passes of monstrous stone,—­these things remained daunting.  It was like riding through a dream in which everything nearby seemed fey and glamorous, but the background was deathly-still and ominous.

There were the usual noises inside the jeep.  The air had a metallic smell.  One could detect the odors of oil, and ozone, and varnish, and plastic upholstery.  There were the crunching sounds of the wheels, traveling over stone.  There was the paradoxic gentleness of all the jeep’s motions because of the low gravity.  Cochrane even noted the extraordinary feel of an upholstered seat when one weighs only one-sixth as much as back on Earth.  All his sensations were dreamlike—­but he felt that headachy exhaustion that comes of overwork too long continued.

“I’ll try,” he said tiredly, “to see that you have some fun before you go back, Babs.  You’ll go back as soon as we dive off into whatever we’re diving into, but you ought to get in the regular tourist stuff up here, anyhow.”

Babs said nothing.  Pointedly.

The moon-jeep clanked and rumbled onward.  The hissing of steam was audible.  The vehicle swung around a pinnacle of stone, and Cochrane saw the space-ship.

In the pale Earthlight it was singularly beautiful.  It had been designed to lure investors in a now-defunct promotion.  It was stream-lined, and gigantic, and it glittered like silver.  It stood upright on its tail-fins, and it had lighted ports and electric lights burned in the emptiness about it.  But there was only one moon-jeep at its base.  A space-suited figure moved toward a dangling sling and sat in it.  He rose deliberately toward an open airlock-hatch, and the other moon-jeep moved soundlessly away back toward Lunar City.