rints. They were excellent. He went back to the vision-set to transmit
them back to Luna. He sent them off. They would be forwarded to
observatories on Earth and inspected. They literally could not be faked.
There were thousands of stars on each print--with the Milky Way for
background on some--and each of those thousands of stars would be
identified, and each would have changed its relative position from that
seen on earth, with relation to every other star. Astronomers could
detect the spot from which the picture had been taken. But to fake a
single print would have required years of computation and almost
certainly there would have been slip-ups somewhere. These pictures were
unassailable evidence that a human expedition had reached a point in
space that had been beyond all human dreaming.

Then Cochrane had nothing to do. He was a supernumerary member of the
crew. The pilot and Jones were in charge of the ship. Jamison would take
care of the catering, when meal-time came. Probably Alicia Keith--no,
Alicia Simms--would help. Nothing else needed attention. The rockets
either worked or they didn't. The air-apparatus needed no supervision.
Cochrane found himself without a function.

He went restlessly back to the control-room. He found Babs looking
helpless, and Jones staring blankly at a slip of paper in his hands,
while the pilot was still at a blister-port, staring at the stars
through one of those squat, thick telescopes used on Luna for the
examination of the planets.

"How goes the research?" asked Cochrane.

"We're stumped," said Jones painfully. "I forgot something."

"What?"

"Whenever I wanted anything," said Jones, "I wrote it out and gave a
memo to Babs. She attended to it."

"My system, exactly," admitted Cochrane.

"I wrote out a memo for her," said Jones unhappily, "asking for
star-charts and for her to get somebody to set up a system of
astrogation for outside the solar system. Nobody's ever bothered to do
that before. Nobody's ever reached even Mars! But I figured we'd need
it."

Cochrane waited. Jones showed him a creased bit of paper, closely
written.

"I wrote out the memo and put it in my pocket," said Jones, "and I
forgot to give it to Babs. So we can't astrogate. We don't know how. We
didn't get either star-charts or instructions. We're lost."

Cochrane waited.

"Apparently Al was mistaken in the star he spotted as our sun," added
Jones. He referred to the pilot, whom Cochrane had