on to do before something
happens. So ... we can ... act like people."

Diane smiled very faintly.

"Not like people. Just like us." She said wistfully: "Don't you want to
tell me something? Something you intended to tell me only after we got
back to base?"

He did. He told it to her. And there was also something she had not
intended to tell him at all--unless he told her first. She said it now.
They felt that such sayings were of the greatest possible importance.
They clung together, saying them again. And it seemed wholly monstrous
that two people who cared so desperately had wasted so much time acting
like professional associates--explorer-ship officers--when things like
this were to be said ...

As they talked incoherently, or were even more eloquently silent, the
ship's ordinary lights came on. The battery-lamp went on.

"We've got to switch back to ship's circuit," said Baird reluctantly.
They separated, and restored the operating circuits to normal. "We've got
fourteen days," he added, "and so much time to be on duty, and we've a
lost lifetime to live in fourteen days! Diane--"

She flushed vividly. So Baird said very politely into the microphone to
the navigation room:

"Sir, Lieutenant Holt and myself would like to speak directly to you in
the navigation room. May we?"

"_Why not?_" growled the skipper. "_You've noticed that the Plumie
generator is giving the whole ship lights and services?_"

"Yes, sir," said Baird. "We'll be there right away."

* * * * *

They heard the skipper's grunt as they hurried through the door. A moment
later the ship's normal gravity returned--also through the Plumie
generator. Up was up again, and down was down, and the corridors and
cabins of the _Niccola_ were brightly illuminated. Had the ship been
other than an engineless wreck, falling through a hundred and fifty
million miles of emptiness into the flaming photosphere of a sun,
everything would have seemed quite normal, including the errand Baird and
Diane were upon, and the fact that they held hands self-consciously as
they went about it.

They skirted the bulkhead of the main air tank. They headed along the
broader corridor which went past the indented inner door of the air lock.
They had reached that indentation when Baird saw that the inner air-lock
door was closing. He saw a human pressure suit past its edge. He saw the
corner of some object that had been put down on the air-lo