“Quit it!  I’ve already been realizing how little I know about the things we’re going to need to survive!  Let me fool myself about masculine strength, anyhow!”

She smiled at him, a very little.  But she went obediently to the fire to experiment with cookery of the one palatable variety of fruit from this planet’s trees.  He drove himself to bring more wood than before.  When he settled down she said absorbedly: 

“Try this, Jed.”

Then she flushed hotly because she’d inadvertently used his familiar name.  But she extended something that was toasted and not too much burned.  He ate, with weariness sweeping over him like a wave.  The cooked fruit was almost a normal food, but it did need salt.  There would be trouble finding salt on this planet.  The water that should be in the seas was frozen in the glaciers.  Salt would not have been leached out of the soil and gathered in the seas.  It would be a serious problem.  But Cochrane was very tired indeed.

“I’ll take the first two hours,” said Babs briskly.  “Then I’ll wake you.”

He showed her how to use the weapon.  He meant to let himself drift quietly off to sleep, acting as if he had a little trouble going off.  But he didn’t.  He lay down, and the next thing he knew Babs was shaking him violently.  In the first dazed instant when he opened his eyes he thought they were surrounded by forest fire.  But it wasn’t that.  It was dawn, and Babs had let him sleep the whole night through, and the sky was golden-yellow from one horizon to the other.  More, he heard the now-familiar cries of creatures in the forest.  But also he heard a roaring sound, very thin and far away, which could only be one thing.

“Jed!  Jed!  Get up!  Quick!  The ship’s coming back!  The ship!  We’ve got to move!”

She dragged him to his feet.  He was suddenly wide-awake.  He ran with her.  He flung back his head and stared up as he ran.  There was a pin-point of flame and vapor almost directly overhead.  It grew swiftly in size.  It plunged downward.

They reached the surrounding forest and plunged into it.  Babs stumbled, and Cochrane caught her, and they ran onward hand in hand to get clear away from the down-blast of the rockets.  The rocket-roaring grew louder and louder.

The castaways gazed.  It was the ship.  From below, fierce flames poured down, blue-white and raging.  The silver hull slanted a little.  It shifted its line of descent.  It came down with a peculiar deftness of handling that Cochrane had not realized before.  Its rockets splashed, but the flame did not extend out to the edge of the clearing that had been burned off at first.  The rocket-flames, indeed, did not approach the proportion to be seen on rockets on film-tape, or as Cochrane had seen below the moon-rocket descending on Earth.

The ship settled within yards of its original landing-place.  Its rockets dwindled, but remained burning.  They dwindled again.  The noise was outrageous, but still not the intolerable tumult of a moon-rocket landing on Earth.