This was the dining-saloon.  The ship having been built to impress investors in a stock-sales enterprise, it had been beautifully equipped with trimmings.  And, having had to rise from Earth to Luna, and needing to take an acceleration of a good many gravities, it had necessarily to be reasonably well-built.  It had had, in fact, to be an honest job of ship-building in order to put across a phoney promotion.  But there were trimmings that could have been spared.  The ports opening upon emptiness, for example, were not really practical arrangements.  But everybody but Holden and the two men in the control-room now clustered at those ports, looking out at the stars.  There was Jamison and Bell the writer, and Johnny Simms and his wife.  Babs had been here and gone.

Bell was busy with a camera.  As Cochrane moved to tell him of the need for star-shots to prove to a waiting planet that they were alive, Johnny Simms turned and saw Cochrane.  His expression was amiable and unawed.

“Hello,” said Johnny Simms cheerfully.

Cochrane nodded curtly.

“I bought West’s stock in Spaceways,” said Johnny Simms, amusedly, “because I want to come along.  Right?”

“So I heard,” said Cochrane, as curtly as before.

“West said,” Johnny Simms told him gleefully, “that he was going back to Earth, punch Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe on their separate noses, and then go down to South Carolina and raise edible snails for the rest of his life.”

“An understandable ambition,” said Cochrane.  He frowned, waiting to talk to Bell, who was taking an infernally long time to focus a camera out of a side-port.

“It’s going to be good when he tries to cash my check,” said Johnny Simms delightedly.  “I stopped payment on it when he wouldn’t pick up the tab for some drinks I invited him to have!”

Cochrane forced his face to impassiveness.  Johnny Simms was that way, he understood.  He was a psychopathic personality.  He was completely insensitive to notions of ethics.  Ideas of right and wrong were as completely meaningless to him as tones to a tone-deaf person, or pastel tints to a man who is color-blind.  They simply didn’t register.  His mind was up to par, and he could be a charming companion.  He could experience the most kindly of emotions and most generous of impulses, which he put into practice.  But he also had a normal person’s impulse to less admirable behavior, and he simply could not understand that there was any difference between impulses.  He put the unpleasing ones into practice too.  He’d been on the moon to avoid extradition because of past impulses which society called murderous.  On this ship it was yet to be discovered what he would do—­but because he was technically sane his lawyers could have prevented a take off unless he came along.  Cochrane, at the moment, felt an impulse to heave him out an airlock as a probable danger.  But Cochrane was not a psychopathic personality.