And as it turned out, not all of them.
The psychiatric treatment began with an innocent-seeming news-item from
Lunar City saying that Dabney, the so-and-so scientist, had consented to
act as consulting physicist to Spaceways, Inc., for the practical
application of his recent discovery of a way to send messages faster
than light.
This was news simply because it came from the moon. It got fairly wide
distribution, but no emphasis.
Then the publicity campaign broke. On orders from Cochrane, Jamison the
extrapolating genius got slightly plastered, in company with the two
news-association reporters in Lunar City. He confided that Spaceways,
Inc., had been organized and was backed to develop the Dabney
faster-than-light-signalling field into a faster-than-light-travel
field. The news men pumped him of all his extrapolations. Cynically,
they checked to see who might be preparing to unload stock. They found
no preparations for stock-sales. No registration of the company for
raising funds. It wasn't going to the public for money. It wasn't
selling anybody anything. Then Cochrane refused to see any reporters at
all, everybody connected with the enterprise shut up tighter than a
clam, and Jamison vanished into a hotel room where he was kept occupied
with beverages and food at Dabney's father-in-law's expense.
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