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 reason—­those imaginary people—­to act unreasonably.

But presently his mind was working again.

“We’ve got to make some plans for ourselves,” he said.  “We can live back on Earth, of course.  We’ve already made a neat sum out of the broadcasts from this trip.  But I don’t think we’ll want to live the way one has to live on Earth, with too many people there.  I’d like—.”

Somebody came clattering up the stairs from below.

“Johnny?” It was Bell.  “Is he up here?”

Cochrane released Babs.