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Dictating as he worked the pen, Cochrane achieved a pear-shaped mass of ink which was quite the size of a large grape before it fell into his waste-basket. It was the largest he'd made to date. It fell slow-motion and splashed violently as he regarded it with harried satisfaction. More time passed. A moon-rocket arrived from Earth. There were new tourists under the thousand-foot plastic dome.
You've hit it!" "You mean...?" Kradzy Zago began. "Yes. You all know of it. It's stood for nobody knows how many millennia, and nobody's ever decided what it was, to begin with, except that somebody, once, filled a valley with concrete, level from mountain-top to mountain-top. The accepted theory is that it was done for a firing-stand for the first Moon-rocket.
It had been made because to break the bonds of Earth's gravity was terribly costly in fuel when a ship had to accelerate slowly to avoid harm to human cargo. The space platform was a filling station in emptiness, at which the moon-rocket would refuel for its next and longer and much less difficult journey of two hundred thirty-odd thousand miles. The stewardess came up the ramp, moving briskly.
They dwindled again. The noise was outrageous, but still not the intolerable tumult of a moon-rocket landing on Earth. The rockets cut off. The airlock door opened. Cochrane and Babs waved cheerfully from the edge of the clearing. Holden appeared in the door and shouted down: "Sorry to be so long coming back." He waved and vanished.
But it hurt to realize that he'd been kidding himself. He'd thought he was important. Important, at least, to the advertising firm of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe. But right now he was on the way like a common legman to take the moon-rocket to Lunar City, and he'd been informed of it just thirty minutes ago. Then he'd been told casually to get to the rocket-port right away.
A moon-rocket, landing at its space-port on Earth, heated the tarmac to red-hotness in the process of landing. Tender-vehicles had to wait for it to cool before they could approach. Here the ship had landed in woodland. Naturally its flames had seared the spot where it came down. And there was inflammable stuff about, which caught fire.
Cochrane was especially apt to notice it because he had lived in a city back on Earth, and had spent four days in the moon-rocket, and then had breathed the Lunar City air for eighteen days more and had just come from the space-ship whose air was distinctly of the canned variety. He did not notice the noise of the sling again in motion behind him.
"Find 'em!" said Jones vexedly. Cochrane didn't try. If a moon-rocket pilot could not spot familiar star-groups, a television producer wasn't likely to see them. And it was obvious, once one thought, that the brighter stars seen from Earth would be mostly the nearer ones. Cochrane was no mathematician, but he could see that there was no data for computation on hand.
Presently Cochrane made deductions and maliciously devised a television commercial. In it, a moon-rocket stewardess, in uniform and looking fresh and charming, would say sweetly that she went without bathing for days at a time on moon-trips, and did not offend because she used whoosit's antistinkum.
Holden closed his eyes and said gratefully: "Shoo them away, Jed, and then come back." Cochrane waved his hands at them. They went away, stumbling and holding on to each other in the eerie dream-likeness and nightmarish situation of no-weight-whatever. There were other passengers from the moon-rocket in this great central space of the platform.
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