“Something can be done even with a six-year-old,” growled Cochrane.  “Holden—.  But he wouldn’t be the best one to try.”

“He definitely wouldn’t be the best one to try,” said Alicia very quietly.

Cochrane turned away.  She knew how Bill Holden felt.  Which might or might not be comforting to him.

The communicator again.  The pictures of foot-high furry bipeds on the glacier planet had made a sensation on television.  A toy-manufacturer wanted the right to make toys like them.  The pictures were copyrighted.  Cochrane matter-of-factly made the deal.  There would be miniature extra-terrestrial animals on sale in all toy-shops within days.  Spaceways, Inc., would collect a royalty on each toy sold.

The rockets boomed, and lessened their noise, and wavered up and down again.  Then there was that deliberate, crunching feel of the great landing-fins pressing into soil with all the ship’s weight bearing down.  The rockets ran on, drumming ever-so-faintly, for a little longer.  Then they cut off.

“We’re landed again!  Let’s see where we are!”

They went up to the control-room.  Johnny Simms stood against the wall, sulking.  He had managed his life very successfully by acting like a spoiled little boy.  Now he had lost any idea of saner conduct.  At the moment, he looked ridiculous.  But Alicia had a bruised cheek and Cochrane could have been killed, and Holden had been in danger because Johnny Simms wanted to and insisted on acting like a rich man’s spoiled little boy.

It occurred to Cochrane that Alicia would probably find recompense for her humiliation and pain in the little-boy penitence—­exactly as temporary as any other little-boy emotion—­when she and Johnny Simms were alone together.

The ship had come down close to the sunset-line of the planet.  Away to the west there was the glint of blue sea.  Dusk was already descending here.  There were smoothly contoured hills in view, and there was a dark patch of forest on one hilltop, and the trees at the woodland’s edge had the same drooping, grass-blade-like foliage of the trees first seen.  But there were larger and more solid giants among them.  The ship had landed on a small plateau, and downhill from it a spring gushed out with such force that the water-surface was rounded by pressure from below.  The water overflowed and went down toward the sea.

“I think we’re all right,” said Al, the pilot.  But he stayed in his seat, in case the ship threatened to sway over.  Cochrane inspected the outer world.

“Well?”

“We sighted what I think you want,” said Jones.  He looked dead-pan and yet secretly complacent.  “Just watch.”

The dusk grew deeper.  Colorings appeared in the west.  They were very similar to the sunset-colorings on Earth.

“Not many volcanoes here.”

The amount of dust was limited, as on Earth.  A great star winked into view in the east.  It was as bright as Venus seen from Earth.  It had a just-perceptible disk.  Close to it, infinitely small, there was a speck of light which seemed somehow like a star.  Cochrane squinted at it.  He thought of the great gas-giant world he’d seen out a port on the way here.  It had an attendant moon-world which itself had icecaps and seas and continents.  He called Jamison.