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

it's a dynamic lie! It gives the frustrated
individual something to do! It sells him hope and therefore
activity—and inactivity is a sort of death!"
    Holden looked at Cochrane with a dreary disinterest.
    "You're adjusted, Jed! But do you really believe that stuff?"
    Cochrane grinned again.
    "Only on Tuesdays and Fridays. It's about two-sevenths true. But it does
have that much truth in it! Nobody ever gets anything done while they
merely make socially acceptable responses to the things that happen to
them! Take Dabney himself! We've got a hell of a thing coming along now
just because he wouldn't make the socially acceptable response to having
a rich wife and no brains. He rebelled. So mankind will start moving to
the stars!"
    "You still believe it?"
    Cochrane grimaced.
    "Yesterday morning I sweated blood in a space-suit out in the crater
beyond Jones' laboratory. He tried his trick. He had a small
signal-rocket mounted on the far side of that crater,—twenty-some
miles. It was in front of the field-plate that established the Dabney
field across the crater to another plate near us. Jones turned on the
field. He ignited the rocket by remote control. I was watching with a
telescope. I gave him the word to fire.... How long do you think it took
that rocket to cross the crater in that field that works like a pipe? It
smashed into the plate at the lab!"
    Holden shook his head.
    "It took slightly," said Cochrane, "slightly under three-fifths of a
second."
    Holden blinked. Cochrane said:
    "A signal-rocket has an acceleration of about six hundred feet per
second, level flight, no gravity component, mass acceleration only. It
should have taken a hundred seconds plus to cross that crater—over
twenty miles. It shouldn't have stayed on course. It did stay on course,
inside the field. It did take under three-fifths of a second. The gadget
works!"
    Holden drew a deep breath.
    "So now you need more money and you want me not to discharge my patient
as cured."
    "Not a bit of it!" snapped Cochrane. "I don't want him as a patient! I'm
only willing to accept him as a customer! But if he wants fame, I'll
sell it to him. Not as something to lean his fragile psyche on, but
something to wallow in! Do you think he could ever get too famous for
his own satisfaction?"
    "Of course not," said Holden. "He's the same fool."
    "Then we're in business," Cochrane told him. "Not that I couldn't peddle
my fish elsewhere. I'm going to! But I'll give him old-customer
preference. I'll want him out at the distress-torp tests this afternoon.
They'll be public."
    "This afternoon?" asked Holden. "Distress-torp?"
    A lunar day is two Earth-weeks-long. A lunar night is equally
long-drawn-out. Cochrane said impatiently:
    "I got out of bed four hours ago. To me that's morning. I'll eat lunch
in an hour. That's noon. Say, three hours from now, whatever o'clock it
is lunar time."
    Holden glanced at his watch and made computations. He said:
    "That'll be half-past two hundred and three o'clock, if you're curious.
But what's a distress-torp?"
    "Shoo!" said Cochrane. "I'll send Babs to find you and load you on the
jeep. You'll see then. Now I'm busy!"
    Holden shrugged and went away, and Cochrane stared at his own watch.
Since a lunar day and night together fill twenty-eight Earth days of
time, a strictly lunar "day" contains nearly three hundred forty
Earth-hours. To call one-twelfth of that period an hour would be an
affectation. To call each twenty-four Earth hours a day would have been
absurd. So the actual period of the moon's rotation was divided into
familiar time-intervals, and a bulletin-board in the hotel lobby in
Lunar City notified those interested that: "
Sunday will be from 143
o'clock to 167 o'clock A.M.
" There would be another Sunday some time
during the lunar afternoon.
    Cochrane debated momentarily whether this information could be used in
the publicity campaign of Spaceways, Inc. Strictly speaking, there was
some slight obligation to throw extra fame