Holden still looked greenish in his
strap-chair. The main saloon was otherwise empty. Cochrane made his way
gingerly to the stair going below. He stepped into thin air and
descended by a pull on the hand-rail.
This was the dining-saloon. The ship having been built to impress
investors in a stock-sales enterprise, it had been beautifully equipped
with trimmings. And, having had to rise from Earth to Luna, and needing
to take an acceleration of a good many gravities, it had necessarily to
be reasonably well-built. It had had, in fact, to be an honest job of
ship-building in order to put across a phoney promotion. But there were
trimmings that could have been spared. The ports opening upon emptiness,
for example, were not really practical arrangements. But everybody but
Holden and the two men in the control-room now clustered at those ports,
looking out at the stars. There was Jamison and Bell the writer, and
Johnny Simms and his wife. Babs had been here and gone.
Bell was busy with a camera. As Cochrane moved to tell him of the need
for star-shots to prove to a waiting planet that they were alive, Johnny
Simms turned and saw Cochrane.
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