Donning his jak, he arose and kicked his way defiantly through the welter of paper and stamped free of it as he reached the door. He hurried up the corridor to the elevator, eight or ten paces in advance of Wyckoff, and jabbed the button. "Sam my boy," he barked impatiently, waiting for the car, "the worst cause of panic is panic. I've been on the market and I know!"
The elevator door slid shut and Wyckoff repeated his earlier question, "Is it really bad, El?"
"Probably nothing a little prompt action can't fix," Avery replied. "It's going to take two more turnovers, though. You know we haven't any jets in the nose to amount to anything, and we'll have to tack back across our charted course like bats out of you know where. Carruthers will have to whip up a new batch of charts for the sky-watchers, too, but we can still outsmart those idiots on earth and land on Venus if we want to."
"If we want to?" The car stopped and the two got out.
"I said if we want to, and that's what I meant," Avery replied tartly, heading up the Saloon floor corridor. "I'll bet most of us didn't want or expect much more than to cut loose from our old lives and problems; and that's completely accomplished. Most of us just wanted to crawl away and die with some decent measure of privacy. We can do that, too, if we want to."
Through the thin panel of the saloon door the music came, singing weakly at first, then growing, tremulously....
Eternal Father, God of Grace,
Whose hand hath set the stars in place,
"We've changed our minds, Elbert," said Samuel Wyckoff.