"I thought you'd be pleased," said Jones. "What I'm really telling you is that now we've got fuel enough to reach the Milky Way."
"Let's not," suggested Cochrane, "and say we did! You've got a new star picked out to travel to?"
Jones shrugged his shoulders. In him, the gesture indicated practically hysterical frustration. But he said:
"Yes. Twenty-one light-years. Back on Earth they're anxious for us to check on sol-type suns and Earth-type planets."
"For once," said Cochrane, "I am one with the great scientific minds. Let's go over."
He made his way to the circular stairway leading down to the main saloon. On his clumsy way across the saloon floor to the communicator, he felt the peculiar sensation of the booster-current, which should have been a sound, but wasn't. It was the sensation which had preceded the preposterous leap of the space-ship away from Luna, when in a heart-beat of time all stars looked like streaks of light, and the ship traveled nearly two light-centuries.
Sunshine blinked, and then shone again in the ports around the saloon walls. The second shining came from a different direction—as if somebody had switched off one exterior light and turned on another—and at a different angle to the floor.
Cochrane reached the communicator. He felt no weight. He strapped himself into the chair. He switched on the vision-phone which sent radiation along the field to a balloon two hundred odd light-years from Earth—that was the balloon near the glacier planet—and then switched to the field traveling to a second balloon then the last hundred seventy-odd light-years back to the moon, and then from Luna City down to Earth.
He put in his call. He got an emergency message that had been waiting for him. Seconds later he fought his way frantically through no-weight to the control-room again.
"Jamison! Bell!" he cried desperately. "We've got a broadcast due in twenty minutes! I lost track of time! We're sponsored on four continents and we damwell have to put on a show! What the devil! Why didn't somebody—"