Joe, the men were to notice in the coming days, seemed to make a point of never eating with the bunch after that. But he did it so smoothly, it wasn't offensive....
Venus, in the days that followed, grew from a tiny yellow-green flame, that Bairn, the pilot, had noticed in the first hours of the flight, to a white globe, just hinting a tint of blue, that began to fill the heavens before him.
Joe, on an off hour from the power room, sat quietly in the co-pilot's chair, drinking in the planet. He and Bairn, usually so taciturn, had talked much in the days of the flight.
This day, when Joe came in, Bairn looked at him with a strange twist to his mouth. He said nothing for quite a while, the two just sitting there, Joe looking up and ahead, Bairn, apparently preoccupied with figures on his charts.
Finally Bairn said:
"Has Arden said anything to you?"
Joe shook his head. "No," he said. "Why?"
Bairn, apparently speaking absentmindedly, said:
"Arlie's wife, Mary, has the radio disease. She's in the first stage. Has the blue coloring. It means everything to Arlie that this ship gets to Venus and back. Venus has the only radio-active static compound that matches the stuff from the meteorite."
"Yes," Joe said. "I know. It was only luck that scientist, Struthers, had that meteorite in the room with him when he had the disease. It cured him. And then scientists and astronomers searched star spectrums to find a match for the color scheme that they found in the meteorite metal."