While he slept, the world wagged on and the cosmos continued on its normal course.  The two moons of Earth—­one natural and one artificial—­swung in splendid circles about.  A psychiatrist should not be the means of associ-[Missing text] that planet’s divided rings.  The red spot of Jupiter and the bands on that gas-giant world moved in orderly fashion about its circumference.  Light-centuries away, giant Cepheid suns expanded monstrously and contracted again, rather more rapidly than their gravitational fields could account for.  Double stars sedately swung about each other.  Comets reached their farthest points and, mere aggregations of frigid jagged stones and metal, prepared for another plunge back into light and heat and warmth.

And various prosaic actions took place on Luna.

When Cochrane waked and went back to the hotel-room in use as an office, he found Babs talking confidentially to a woman—­girl, rather—­whom Cochrane vaguely remembered.  Then he did a double take.  He did remember her.  Three or four years before she’d been the outstanding television personality of the year.  She’d been pretty, but not so pretty that you didn’t realize that she was a person.  She was everything that Marilyn Winters was not—­and she’d been number two name in television.

Cochrane said blankly: 

“Aren’t you Alicia Keith?”

The girl smiled faintly.  She wasn’t as pretty as she had been.  She looked patient.  And an expression of patience, on a woman’s face, is certainly not unpleasant.  But it isn’t glamorous, either.

“I was,” she said.  “I married Johnny Simms.”

Cochrane looked at Babs.

“They live up here,” explained Babs.  “I pointed him out at the swimming-pool the day we got here.”

“Wonderful,” said Cochrane.  “How—­”

“Johnny,” said Alicia, “has bought into your Spaceways corporation.  He got your man West drunk and bought his shares of Spaceway stock.”

Cochrane sat down—­not hard, because it was impossible to sit down hard on the moon.  But he sat down as hard as it was possible to sit.

“Why’d he do that?”

“He found out you had hold of the old Mars colony ship.  He understands you’re going to take a trip out to the stars.  He wants to go along.  He’s very much like a little boy.  He hates it here.”

“Then why live—.”  Cochrane checked the question, not quite in time.

“He can’t go back to Earth,” said Alicia calmly.  “He’s a psychopathic personality.  He’s sane and quite bright and rather dear in his way, but he simply can’t remember what is right and wrong.  Especially when he gets excited.  When they fixed up Lunar City as an international colony, by sheer oversight they forgot to arrange for extradition from it.  So Johnny can live here.  He can’t live anywhere else—­not for long.”

Cochrane said nothing.

“He wants to go with you,” said Alicia pleasantly.  “He’s thrilled.  The lawyer his family keeps up here to watch over him is thrilled, too.  He wants to go back and visit his family.  And as a stockholder, Johnny can keep you from taking a ship or any other corporate property out of the jurisdiction of the courts.  But he’d rather go with you.  Of course I have to go too.”