happened to be, of course, that it would still take an impossible amount
of fuel to accelerate the ship--so heavily loaded--to a speed where it
would reach Mars in one human lifetime. Taking off from Luna would solve
only the problem of gravity. It wouldn't do a thing about inertia. So
the ship never rose from its landing near Lunar City. The corporation
that had built it went profitably bankrupt.

Cochrane had been working feverishly to find out who owned that ship
now. Just before the torp-test he'd mentioned, he found that the ship
belonged to the hotel desk-clerk, who had bought it in hope of renting
it sooner or later for television background-shots in case anybody was
crazy enough to make a television film-tape on the moon. He was now
discouraged. Cochrane chartered it, putting up a bond to return it
undamaged. If the ship was lost, the hotel-clerk would get back his
investment--about a week's pay.

So Cochrane had a space-ship practically in his pocket when the public
demonstration of the Dabney field came off at half-past 203 o'clock.

The site of the demonstration was the shadowed, pitch-dark part of the
floor of a crater twenty miles across, with walls some ten thousand
jagged feet high. The furnace-like sunshine made the plain beyond the
shadow into a sea of blinding brightness. The sunlit parts of the
crater's walls were no less terribly glaring. But above the edge of the
cliffs the stars began; infinitely small and many-colored, with
innumerable degrees of brightness. The Earth hung in mid-sky like a
swollen green apple, monstrous in size. And the figures which moved
about the scene of the test could be seen only faintly by reflected
light from the lava plain, because one's eyes had to be adjusted to the
white-hot moon-dust on the plain and mountains.