He went back to the control-room.  Johnny Simms zestfully undertook to outfit them with arms.  He made no proposal to accompany them.  In twenty minutes or so, Cochrane and Holden went into the airlock and the door closed.  A light came on automatically, precisely like the light in an electric refrigerator.  Cochrane found his lips twitching a little as the analogy came to him.  Seconds later the outer door opened, and they gazed down among the branches of tall trees.  Cochrane winced.  There was no railing and the height bothered him.  But Holden swung out the sling.  He and Cochrane descended, dangling, down fifty feet of unscarred, shining, metal hull.

The ground was still hot underfoot.  Holden cast off the sling and moved toward cooler territory with an undignified haste.  Cochrane followed him.

The smells were absolutely commonplace.  Scorched wood.  Smokiness.  There were noises.  Occasional cracklings from burned tree-trunks not wholly consumed.  High-pitched, shrill musical notes.  And in and among the smells there was an astonishing freshness in the feel of the air.  Cochrane was especially apt to notice it because he had lived in a city back on Earth, and had spent four days in the moon-rocket, and then had breathed the Lunar City air for eighteen days more and had just come from the space-ship whose air was distinctly of the canned variety.

He did not notice the noise of the sling again in motion behind him.  He was all eyes and ears and acute awareness of the completely strange environment.  He was the more conscious of a general strangeness because he was so completely an urban product.  Yet he and Holden were vastly less aware of the real strangeness about them than men of previous generations would have been.  They did not notice the oddity of croaking sounds, like frogs, coming from the tree-tops.  When they had threaded their way among leaning charred poles and came to green stuff underfoot and merely toasted foliage all around, Cochrane heard a sweet, high-pitched trilling which came from a half-inch hole in the ground.  But he was not astonished by the place from which the trilling came.  He was astonished at the sound itself.

There was a cry behind them.

"Mr. Cochrane!  Doctor Holden!"

They swung about.  And there was Babs on the ground, just disentangling herself from the sling.  She had followed them out, after waiting until they had left the airlock and could not protest.

Cochrane swore to himself.  But when Babs joined them breathlessly, after a hopping run over the hot ground, he said only: 

“Fancy meeting you here!”

“I—­I couldn’t resist it,” said Babs in breathless apology.  “And you do have guns.  It’s safe enough—­oh, look!”

She stared at a bush which was covered with pale purple flowers.  Small creatures hovered in the air about it.  She approached it and exclaimed again at the sweetness of its scent.  Cochrane and Holden joined her in admiration.