The corporation
that had built it went profitably bankrupt.
Cochrane had been working feverishly to find out who owned that ship
now. Just before the torp-test he'd mentioned, he found that the ship
belonged to the hotel desk-clerk, who had bought it in hope of renting
it sooner or later for television background-shots in case anybody was
crazy enough to make a television film-tape on the moon. He was now
discouraged. Cochrane chartered it, putting up a bond to return it
undamaged. If the ship was lost, the hotel-clerk would get back his
investment--about a week's pay.
So Cochrane had a space-ship practically in his pocket when the public
demonstration of the Dabney field came off at half-past 203 o'clock.
The site of the demonstration was the shadowed, pitch-dark part of the
floor of a crater twenty miles across, with walls some ten thousand
jagged feet high. The furnace-like sunshine made the plain beyond the
shadow into a sea of blinding brightness. The sunlit parts of the
crater's walls were no less terribly glaring. But above the edge of the
cliffs the stars began; infinitely small and many-colored, with
innumerable degrees of brightness.
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