He put in his call.  He got an emergency message that had been waiting for him.  Seconds later he fought his way frantically through no-weight to the control-room again.

“Jamison!  Bell!” he cried desperately.  “We’ve got a broadcast due in twenty minutes!  I lost track of time!  We’re sponsored on four continents and we damwell have to put on a show!  What the devil!  Why didn’t somebody—­”

Jamison said obviously from a blister-port where he swung a squat star-telescope from one object to another: 

“Noo-o-o.  That’s a gas-giant.  We’d be squashed if we landed there—­though that big moon looks promising.  I think we’d better try yonder.”

“Okay,” said Jones in a flat voice.  “Center on the next one in, Al, and we’ll toddle over.”

Cochrane felt the ship swinging in emptiness.  He knew because it seemed to turn while he felt that he stayed still.

“We’ve got a show to put on!” he raged.  “We’ve got to fake something—.”

Jamison looked aside from his telescope.

“Tell him, Bell,” he said expansively.

“I wrote a script of sorts,” said Bell apologetically.  “The story-line’s not so good—­that’s why I wanted a castaway narrative to put in it, though I wouldn’t have had time, really.  We spliced film and Jamison narrated it, and you can run it off.  It’s a kind of show.  We ran it as a space-platform survey of the glacier-planet, basing it on pictures we took while we were in orbit around it.  It’s a sort of travelogue.  Jamison did himself proud.  Alicia can find the tape-can for you.”

He went back to his cameras.  Cochrane saw a monstrous globe swing past a control-room port.  It was a featureless mass of clouds, save for striations across what must be its equator.  It looked like the Lunar Observatory pictures of Jupiter, back in the Sun’s family of planets.

It went past the port, and a moon swam into view.  It was a very large moon.  It had at least one ice-cap—­and therefore an atmosphere—­and there were mottlings of its surface which could hardly be anything but continents and seas.

“We’ve got to put a show on!” raged Cochrane.  “And now!”

“It’s all set,” Bell assured him.  “You can transmit it.  I hope you like it!”

Cochrane sputtered.  But there was nothing to do but transmit whatever Bell and Jamison had gotten ready.  He swam with nightmarelike difficulty back to the communicator.  He shouted frantically for Babs.  She and Alicia came.  Alicia found the film-tape, and Cochrane threaded it into the transmitter, and bitterly ran the first few feet.  Babs smiled at him, and Alicia looked at him oddly.  Evidently, Babs had confided the consequence of their casting-away.  But Cochrane faced an emergency.  He began to check timings with far-distant Earth.