Cochrane looked. He said nothing. Holden stumbled on to the airlock. He remembered to hold the door open for Babs. And then there was the interior of the laboratory. It was not wholly familiar even to Cochrane, who had used sets on the Dikkipatti Hour of most of the locations in which human dramas can unfold. This was a physics laboratory, pure and simple. The air smelled of ozone and spilled acid and oil and food and tobacco-smoke and other items. West and Jamison were already here, their space-suits removed. They sat before beer at a table with innumerable diagrams scattered about. There was a deep-browed man rather impatiently turning to face his new visitors. Holden clumsily unfastened the face-plate of his helmet and gloomily explained his mission. He introduced Cochrane and Babs, verifying in the process that the dark man was the Jones he had come to see. A physics laboratory high in the fastnesses of the Lunar Apennines is an odd place for a psychiatrist to introduce himself on professional business. But Holden only explained unhappily that Dabney had sent them to learn about his discovery and arrange for a public-relations job to make it known. Cochrane saw Jones' expression flicker sarcastically just once during Holden's explanation. Otherwise he was poker-faced. "I was explaining the discovery to these two," he observed. "Shoot it," said Cochrane to West. It was reasonable to ask West for an explanation, because he would translate everything into televisable terms. West said briskly--exactly as if before a television camera--that Mr. Dabney had started from the well-known fact that the properties of space are modified by energy fields. Magnetic and gravitational and electrostatic fields rotate polarized light or bend light or do this or that as the case may be. But all previous modifications of the constants of space had been in essentially spherical fields. All previous fields had extended in all directions, increasing in intensity as the square of the distance ... "Cut," said Cochrane. West automatically abandoned his professional delivery. He placidly re-addressed himself to his beer. "How about it, Jones?" asked Cochrane. "Dabney's got a variation? What is it?" "It's a field of force that doesn't spread out. You set up two plates and establish this field between them," said Jones curtly. "It's circularly polarized and it doesn't expand. It's like a searchlight beam or a microwave beam, and it stays the same size like a pipe. In that field--or pipe--radiation travels faster than it does outside. The properties of space are changed between the plates. Therefore the speed of all radiation. That's all." Cochrane meditatively seated himself. He approved of this Jones, whose eyebrows practically met in the middle of his forehead. He was not more polite than politeness required. He did not express employer-like rapture at the mention of his employer's name. "But what can be done with it?" asked Cochrane practically.