the ship."

He started for the stairs again. Then he was startled by the frozen
immobility of Holden. Holden's face was deadly. His hands were clenched.
Johnny Simms said with a fine boyish frankness:

"I'm sorry, Cochrane! No hard feelings?"

"Yes," Cochrane snapped. "Hard feelings! I've got them!"

He took Holden's arm. He steered him up the steps. Holden resisted for
the fraction of a second, and Cochrane gripped his arm tighter. He got
him up to the deck above.

"If I'd been here," said Holden, unsteadily, "I'd have killed him--if he
hit Alicia! Psychopath or no psychopath--"

"Shut up," said Cochrane firmly. "He shot at me! And in my small way I'm
a psychopath too, Bill. My psychosis is that I don't like his kind of
psychosis. I am psychotically devoted to sense and my possibly quaint
idea of decency. I am abnormally concerned with the real world--and
you'd better come back to it! Look here! I'm pathologically in revolt
against such imbecilities as an overcrowded Earth and people being
afraid of their jobs and people going crackpot from despair. You don't
want me to get cured of that, do you? Then get hold of yourself!"

Bill Holden swallowed. He was still white. But he managed to grimace.

"You're right. Lucky I was outside. You're not a bad psychologist
yourself, Jed."

"I'm better," said Cochrane cynically, "at putting on shows with scrap
film-tape and dream-stuff. So I'm going to look at the films Bell took
as we landed on this planet, and work out some ideas for broadcasts."

He went up another flight, and Holden went with him in a sort of stilly,
unnatural calm. Cochrane ran the film-tape through the reversed camera
for examination.

Outside, there waved long green tresses of extraordinarily elongated
leaves. The patches of reed-like stuff stirred in the breeze. Jamison
appeared in the control-room. He began to question Holden hopefully
about the ground-cover outside. It was not grass. It was broad-leaved.
There would be, Jamison decided happily, an infinitude of under-leaf
forms of life. They would most likely be insects, and there would be
carnivorous other insects to prey upon them. Some species would find it
advantageous to be burrowing insects. There must be other kinds of birds
than the giant specimens that looked like men at a distance, too. On the
glacier planet there had been few birds but many furry creatures.
Possibly the situation was reversed here, though of course it need not
be ..