akfast over, they experienced a new sensation. For the first time in
months they had nothing to do! Used as they were to being surrounded by
pressing tasks, they enjoyed their holiday immensely for a few hours.
Sitting idly at the communicator plate, they scanned the sparkling
heavens with keen interest. Beneath them Jupiter was a brilliant
crescent not far from the sun in appearance, which latter had already
grown perceptibly smaller and less bright. Above them, and to their
right, Saturn shone refulgently, his spectacular rings plainly visible.
All about them were the glories of the firmament, which never fail to
awe the most seasoned observer. But idleness soon became irksome to
those two active spirits, and Stevens prowled restlessly about their
narrow quarters.

"I'm going to go to work before I go dippy," he soon declared. "They've
got lots of power, and we can rig up a transmitter unit to send it over
here to our receptor. Then I can start welding the old _Hope_ together
without waiting until we get to Titan to start it. Think I'll signal
Barkovis to come over, and see what he thinks about it."

The Titanian commander approved the idea, and the transmitting field was
quickly installed. Nadia insisted that she, too, needed to work, and
that she was altogether too good a mechanic to waste; therefore the two
again labored mightily together, day after day. But the girl limited
rigidly their hours of work to those of the working day; and evening
after evening Barkovis visited with them for hours. Dressed in his heavy
space-suit and supported by a tractor beam well out of range of what
seemed to him terrific heat radiated by the bodies of the Terrestrials,
he floated along unconcernedly; while over the multiplex cable of the
thought-exchanger he conversed with the man and woman seated just inside
the open outer door of their air-lock. The Titanian's appetite for
information was insatiable--particularly did he relish everything
pertaining to the earth and to the other inner planets, forever barred
to him and to his kind. In return Stevens and Nadia came gradually to
know the story of the humanity of Titan.

"I am glad beyond measure to have known you," Barkovis mused, one night.
"Your existence proves that there is truth in mythology, as some of
us have always believed. Your visit to Titan will create a furor in
scientific circles, for you are impossibility incarnate--personifications
of the preposterous. In you, wild