he
Spaceway project of being a political move by the party in power for
some dire ultimate purpose.

Ultimately the crackpot inventor would get on the air and announce
triumphantly that only part of his invention had been stolen, because
he'd been too smart to write it down or tell anybody, and he wouldn't
tell anybody--not even a court--the full details of his invention unless
paid twenty-five million in cash down, and royalties afterward. The
project for a congressional investigation of Spaceways would die in
committee.

But there were other griefs. The useless spaceship hulk had to be
emptied of the mining-tools stored in it. This was done by men working
in space-suits. Occupational rules required them to exert not more than
one-fourth of the effort they would have done if working for themselves.
When the ship was empty, air was released in it, and immediately froze
to air-snow. So radiant heaters had to be installed and powered to warm
up the hull to where an atmosphere could exist in it. Its generators had
to be thawed from the metal-ice stage of brittleness and warmed to where
they could be run without breaking themselves to bits.

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