Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) by Operation: Outer Space

the matter on hand now. Cochrane happened to
know the details about Columbus because he'd checked over the research
when he did a show on the Dikkipatti Hour dealing with him. There were
more precedents. The elaborate bargain by which Columbus was to be made
hereditary High Admiral of the Western Oceans, with a bite of all
revenue obtained by the passage he was to discover—he had to hold out
for such terms to make the package he was selling look attractive.
Nobody buys anything that is underpriced too much. It looks phoney. So
Cochrane made his preliminaries rather more impressive than they need
have been from a strictly practical point of view, in order to make the
enterprise practical from a financial aspect.
    There was another precedent he did not intend to follow. Columbus did
not know where he was going when he set sail, he did not know where he
was when he arrived at the end of his voyage, and he didn't know where
he'd been when he got back. Cochrane expected to improve on the
achievement of the earlier explorer's doings in these respects.
    He commandeered the legal department of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins, and
Fallowe to set up the enterprise with strict legality and discretion.
There came into being a corporation called "Spaceways, Inc." which could
not possibly be considered phoney from any inspection of its charter.
Expert legal advice arranged that its actual stock-holders should appear
to be untraceable. Deft manipulation contrived that though its stock was
legally vested in Cochrane and Holden and Jones—Cochrane negligently
threw in Jones as a convenient name to use—and they were officially the
owners of nearly all the stock, nobody who checked up would believe they
were anything but dummies. Stockholdings in West's, and Jamison's and
Bell's names would look like smaller holdings held for other than the
main entrepreneurs. But these stock-holders were not only the legal
owners of record—they were the true owners. Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins
and Fallowe wanted no actual part of Spaceways. They considered the
enterprise merely a psychiatric treatment for a neurotic son-in-law.
Which, of course, it was. So Spaceways, Inc., quite honestly and validly
belonged to the people who would cure Dabney of his frustration—and
nobody at all believed that it would ever do anything else. Not anybody
but those six owners, anyhow. 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. None of
this was standard for a phoney promotion deal.
    The news story exploded. Let loose on an overcrowded planet which had
lost all hope of relief after fifty years in which only the moon had
been colonized—and its colony had a population in the hundreds,
only—the idea of faster-than-light travel