“We know the sun’s a yellow star,” said Jones, “but we don’t know how bright it should be, or what the sky should look like beyond it.”

“Constellations?” asked Cochrane.

“Find ’em!” said Jones vexedly.

Cochrane didn’t try.  If a moon-rocket pilot could not spot familiar star-groups, a television producer wasn’t likely to see them.  And it was obvious, once one thought, that the brighter stars seen from Earth would be mostly the nearer ones.  If Jones was right in his guess that his booster had increased the speed of the ship by sixty to the fourth power, it would have gone some millions of times as fast as the distress-torpedo, for a brief period (the ratio was actually something over nineteen million times) and it happened that nobody had been able to measure the speed of that test-object.

Cochrane was no mathematician, but he could see that there was no data for computation on hand.  After one found out how fast an acceleration of one Earth-gravity in a Dabney field of such-and-such strength speeded up a ship, something like dead reckoning could be managed.  But all that could be known right now was that they had come a long way.

He remembered a television show he’d produced, laid in space on an imaginary voyage.  The script-writer had had one of the characters say that no constellation would be visible at a hundred light-years from the solar system.  It would be rather like a canary trying to locate the window he’d escaped from, from a block away, with no memories of the flight from it.

Cochrane said suddenly, in a pleased tone: 

“This is a pretty good break—­if we can keep them from finding out about it back home!  We’ll have an entirely new program, good for a thirteen-week sequence, on just this!”

Babs stared at him.

“Main set, this control-room,” said Cochrane enthusiastically.  “We’ll get a long-beard scientist back home with a panel of experts.  We’ll discuss our problems here!  We’ll navigate from home, with the whole business on the air!  We’ll have audience-identification up to a record!  Everybody on Earth will feel like he’s here with us, sharing our problems!”

Jones said irritably: 

“You don’t get it!  We’re lost!  We can’t check our speed without knowing where we are and how far we’ve come!  We can’t find out what the ship will do when we can’t find out what it’s done!  Don’t you see?”

Cochrane said patiently: 

“I know!  But we’re in touch with Luna through the Dabney field that got us here!  It transmitted radiation before, faster than light.  It’s transmitting voice and pictures now.  Now we set up a television show which pays for our astrogation and lets the world sit in on the prettier aspects of our travels.  Hm....  How long before you can sit down on a planet, after you have all the navigational aids of—­say—­the four best observatories on Earth to help you?  I’ll arrange for a sponsor—.”