The colors changed and changed, from yellow to gold all over the sky, and still the glory continued.  Presently there was a deep, deep red, deep past imagining, and presently faint bluish stars pierced it, and they stared up at new strange constellations-some very bright indeed—­and all about the ship there was a bed of white ash with glowing embers in it, and a thin sheet of white smoke still flowed away down the valley.

It was long after sunset when Cochrane got up from the communicator.  Communication with Earth was broken at last.  There was a balloon out in space somewhere with an atomic battery maintaining all its surface as a Dabney field plate.  The ship maintained a field between itself and that plate.  The balloon maintained another field between itself and another balloon a mere 178.3 light-years from the solar system.  But the substance of this planet intervened between the nearer balloon and the ship.  Jones made tests and observed that the field continued to exist, but was plugged by the matter of this newly-arrived-at world.  Come tomorrow, when there was no solid-stone barrier to the passage of radiation, they could communicate with Earth again.

But Cochrane was weary and now discouraged.  So long as talk with Earth was possible, he’d kept at it.  There was a great deal of talking to be done.  But a good deal of it was extremely unsatisfactory.

He found Bill Holden having supper with Babs, on the floor below the communicator.  Very much of the recent talk had been over Cochrane’s head.  He felt humiliated by the indignation of scientists who would not tell him what he wanted to know without previous information he could not give.

When he went over to the dining-table, he felt that he creaked from weariness and dejection.  Babs looked at him solicitously, and then jumped up to get him something to eat.  Everybody else was again watching out the ship’s ports at the new, strange world of which they could see next to nothing.

“Bill,” said Cochrane fretfully, “I’ve just been given the dressing-down of my life!  You’re expecting to get out of the airlock in the morning and take a walk.  But I’ve been talking to Earth.  I’ve been given the devil for landing on a strange planet without bringing along a bacteriologist, an organic chemist, an ecologist, an epidemiologist, and a complete laboratory to test everything with, before daring to take a breath of outside air.  I’m warned not to open a port!”

Holden said: 

“You sound as if you’d been talking to a biologist with a reputation.  You ought to know better than that!”

Cochrane protested: 

“I wanted to talk to somebody who knew more than I did!  What could I do but get a man with a reputation?”

Holden shook his head.

“We psychiatrists,” he observed, “go around peeping under the corners of rugs at what people try to hide from themselves.  We have a worm’s-eye view of humanity.  We know better than to throw a difficult problem at a man with an established name!  They’re neurotic about their reputations.  Like Dabney, they get panicky at the idea of anybody catching them in a mistake.  No big name in medicine or biology would dare tell you that of course it’s all right for us to take a walk in the rather pretty landscape outside.”