ot really practical arrangements. But everybody but
Holden and the two men in the control-room now clustered at those ports,
looking out at the stars. There was Jamison and Bell the writer, and
Johnny Simms and his wife. Babs had been here and gone.

Bell was busy with a camera. As Cochrane moved to tell him of the need
for star-shots to prove to a waiting planet that they were alive, Johnny
Simms turned and saw Cochrane. His expression was amiable and unawed.

"Hello," said Johnny Simms cheerfully.

Cochrane nodded curtly.

"I bought West's stock in Spaceways," said Johnny Simms, amusedly,
"because I want to come along. Right?"

"So I heard," said Cochrane, as curtly as before.

"West said," Johnny Simms told him gleefully, "that he was going back to
Earth, punch Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe on their separate
noses, and then go down to South Carolina and raise edible snails for
the rest of his life."

"An understandable ambition," said Cochrane. He frowned, waiting to talk
to Bell, who was taking an infernally long time to focus a camera out of
a side-port.

"It's going to be good when he tries to cash my check," said Johnny
Simms delightedly. "I stopped payment on it when he wouldn't pick up
the tab for some drinks I invited him to have!"

Cochrane forced his face to impassiveness. Johnny Simms was that way, he
understood. He was a psychopathic personality. He was completely
insensitive to notions of ethics. Ideas of right and wrong were as
completely meaningless to him as tones to a tone-deaf person, or pastel
tints to a man who is color-blind. They simply didn't register. His mind
was up to par, and he could be a charming companion. He could experience
the most kindly of emotions and most generous of impulses, which he put
into practice. But he also had a normal person's impulse to less
admirable behavior, and he simply could not understand that there was
any difference between impulses. He put the unpleasing ones into
practice too. He'd been on the moon to avoid extradition because of past
impulses which society called murderous. On this ship it was yet to be
discovered what he would do--but because he was technically sane his
lawyers could have prevented a take off unless he came along. Cochrane,
at the moment, felt an impulse to heave him out an airlock as a probable
danger. But Cochrane was not a psychopathic personality.

He stopped Bell in his picture-taking and looked at the first of the
p