felt neglected. Everybody
was busy. But mostly he felt tired.

He slept.

Then Babs was shaking his arm, her eyes shining.

"Mr. Cochrane!" she cried urgently. "Mr. Cochrane! Wake up! Go on up to
the control-room! We're going to take off!"

He blinked at her.

"We!" Then he started up, and went five feet into the air from the
violence of his uncalculated movement. "We? No you don't! You go back to
Lunar City where you'll be safe!"

Then he heard a peculiar drumming, rumbling noise. He had heard it
before. In the moonship. It was rockets being tested; being burned;
rockets in the very last seconds of preparation before take-off for the
stars.

He didn't drop back to the floor beside the chair he'd occupied. The
floor rose to meet him.

"I've had our baggage brought on board," said Babs, happily. "I'm going
because I'm a stockholder! Hold on to something and climb those stairs
if you want to see us go up! I'm going to be busy!"

CHAPTER FIVE

The physical sensations of ascending to the ship's control-room were
weird in the extreme. Cochrane had just been wakened from a worn-out
sleep, and it was always startling on the moon to wake and find one's
self weighing one-sixth of normal. It took seconds to remember how one
got that way. But on the way up the stairs, Cochrane was further
confused by the fact that the ship was surging this way and swaying
that. It moved above the moon's surface to get over the tilted flat
Dabney field plate on the ground a hundred yards from the ship's
original position.

The Dabney field, obviously, was not in being. The ship hovered on its
rockets. They had been designed to lift it off of Earth--and they
had--against six times the effective gravity here, and with an
acceleration of more gravities on top of that. So the ship rose lightly,
almost skittishly. When gyros turned to make it drift sidewise--as a
helicopter tilts in Earth's atmosphere--it fairly swooped to a new
position. Somebody jockeyed it this way and that.

Cochrane got to the control-room by holding on with both hands to
railings. He was angry and appalled.

The control-room was a hemisphere, with vertical vision-screens
picturing the stars overhead. Jones stood in an odd sort of harness
beside a set of control-switches that did not match the smoothly
designed other controls of the ship. He looked out of a plastic blister,
by which he could see around and below the ship. He made urgent signals
to a man C