He turned away.  Babs stood by Alicia, offering a handkerchief for Alicia to put to her cheek.  Jamison listened unhappily as Johnny Simms explained brightly that he had always been that way.  When he got excited he didn’t realize what he was doing.  He said almost with pride that he hadn’t ever been any other way than that.  He didn’t really mean to kill anybody, but when he got excited—.

“What happened?” demanded Holden.

“Our little psychopath,” said Cochrane in a grating voice, “put on an act.  He threatened me with a rifle.  He hit Alicia first.  Jamison, trace that bullet-hole.  See if it got through to the skin of the ship.”

He started for the stairs again.  Then he was startled by the frozen immobility of Holden.  Holden’s face was deadly.  His hands were clenched.  Johnny Simms said with a fine boyish frankness: 

“I’m sorry, Cochrane!  No hard feelings?”

“Yes,” Cochrane snapped.  “Hard feelings!  I’ve got them!”

He took Holden’s arm.  He steered him up the steps.  Holden resisted for the fraction of a second, and Cochrane gripped his arm tighter.  He got him up to the deck above.

“If I’d been here,” said Holden, unsteadily, “I’d have killed him—­if he hit Alicia!  Psychopath or no psychopath—­”

“Shut up,” said Cochrane firmly.  “He shot at me!  And in my small way I’m a psychopath too, Bill.  My psychosis is that I don’t like his kind of psychosis.  I am psychotically devoted to sense and my possibly quaint idea of decency.  I am abnormally concerned with the real world—­and you’d better come back to it!  Look here!  I’m pathologically in revolt against such imbecilities as an overcrowded Earth and people being afraid of their jobs and people going crackpot from despair.  You don’t want me to get cured of that, do you?  Then get hold of yourself!”

Bill Holden swallowed.  He was still white.  But he managed to grimace.

“You’re right.  Lucky I was outside.  You’re not a bad psychologist yourself, Jed.”

“I’m better,” said Cochrane cynically, “at putting on shows with scrap film-tape and dream-stuff.  So I’m going to look at the films Bell took as we landed on this planet, and work out some ideas for broadcasts.”

He went up another flight, and Holden went with him in a sort of stilly, unnatural calm.  Cochrane ran the film-tape through the reversed camera for examination.

Outside, there waved long green tresses of extraordinarily elongated leaves.  The patches of reed-like stuff stirred in the breeze.  Jamison appeared in the control-room.  He began to question Holden hopefully about the ground-cover outside.  It was not grass.  It was broad-leaved.  There would be, Jamison decided happily, an infinitude of under-leaf forms of life.  They would most likely be insects, and there would be carnivorous other insects to prey upon them.  Some species would find it advantageous to be burrowing insects.  There must be other kinds of birds than the giant specimens that looked like men at a distance, too.  On the glacier planet there had been few birds but many furry creatures.  Possibly the situation was reversed here, though of course it need not be ...