touching of the horizon and its complete setting. But Cochrane hadn't
thought of it at sunset.

Presently he wandered down to where Babs and Alicia worked in the
kitchen to prepare a meal. He tried to help. The atmosphere was much
more like that in a small apartment back home than on a space-ship among
the stars. This was not in any way such a journey of exploration as the
writers of fiction had imagined. Jamison came down presently and offered
to prepare some special dish in which he claimed to excel. There was no
mention of Johnny Simms. Alicia, elaborately ignoring all that was past,
told Jamison that Babs and Cochrane were now an acknowledged romance and
actually had plans for marriage immediately the ship returned to Earth.
Jamison made the usual inept jests suited to such an occasion.

Presently they called the others to dinner. Jones and Johnny Simms were
long behind the others, and Jones' expression was conspicuously
dead-pan. Johnny Simms looked sulkily rebellious. His sulking had not
attracted attention in the control-room. He had meant to refuse sulkily
to come to dinner. But Jones wouldn't trust him--alone in the
control-room. Now he sat down, scowling, and ostentatiously refused to
eat, despite Alicia's coaxing. He snarled at her.

This, also, was not in the tradition of the behavior of voyagers of
space. They dined in the over-large saloon of a ship that had never been
meant really to leave the moon. The ship stood upright under strange
stars upon a stranger world, and all about it outside there were the
resting forms of thousands upon thousands of creatures like cattle. And
the dinner-table conversation was partly family-style jests about Babs'
and Cochrane's new romantic status, and partly about a television
broadcast which had to be ready for a certain number of Earth-hours yet
ahead. And nobody paid any attention to Johnny Simms, glowering at the
table and refusing to eat.

It was a mistake, probably.

Much, much later, Cochrane and Babs were again in the control-room, and
this time they were alone.

"Look!" said Cochrane vexedly. "Do you realize that I haven't kissed you
since we got back on the ship? What happened?"

"You!" said Babs indignantly. "You've been thinking about something else
every second of the time!"

Cochrane did not think about anything else for several minutes. He began
to recall with new tolerance the insane antics of people he had been
producing shows about. They had reas