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.

He went back to the business at hand. Some two years before there had
been a fake corporation organized strictly for the benefit of its
promoters. It had built a rocket-ship ostensibly for the establishment
of a colony on Mars. The ship had managed to stagger up to Luna, but no
farther. Its promoters had sold stock on the promise that a ship that
could barely reach Luna could take off from that small globe with six
times as much fuel as it could lift off of Earth. Which was true.
Investors put in their money on that verifiable fact. But the truth