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.

There was no debris about. There was no cargo waiting to be loaded.
Cochrane did see a great metal plate, tilted on the ground, with a large
box attached to it by cables. That would be the generators and the
field-plate for a Dabney field. It was plainly to remain on the moon. It
was not underneath the ship. Cochrane puzzled tiredly over it for a
moment. Then he understood. The ship would lift on its rockets, hover
over the plate--which would be generating its half of the field--and
then Jones would switch on the apparatus in the ship itself. The
forward, needle-pointed nose of the ship would become another generator
of the Dabney field. The ship's inertia, in that field, would be
effectively reduced to a fraction of its former value. The rockets,
which might give it an acceleration of a few hundred feet per second
anywhere but in a Dabney field, would immediately accelerate the ship
and all its contents to an otherwise unattainable velocity. The
occupants of t