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.
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