"You'll give me some data on plants and animals, Mr. Cochrane? Won't you? I'm doing a book with Bell's pictures, and—"
"Let me alone!" raged Cochrane.
He reached the control-room. Al, the pilot, sat at the controls with an air of special alertness.
"You're all right? For our lined up trip, we ought to leave in about twenty minutes. We'll be pointing just about right then."
"I'm all right," said Cochrane. "And you can take off when you please." To Jones he said: "How'd you find us? I didn't think it could be done."
"Doctor Holden figured it out," said Jones. "Simple enough, but I was lost! When the ground-shocks came, everybody else ran to the ship. We waited for you. You didn't come." It had been, of course, because Cochrane would not risk taking Babs through a forest in which trees were falling. "We finally had to choose between taking off and crashing. So we took off."
"That was quite right. We'd all be messed up if you hadn't," Cochrane told him.
Jones waved his hands.
"I didn't think we could ever find you again. We were sixty light-years away when that booster effect died out. Then Doctor Holden got on the communicator. He got Earth. The astronomers back there located us and gave us the line to get back by. We found the planet. Even then I didn't see how we'd pick out the valley. But Doc had had 'em checking the shots we transmitted as we were making our landing. We had the whole first approach on film-tape. They put a crowd of map-comparators to work. We went in a Space Platform orbit around the planet, transmitting what we saw from out there—they figured the orbit for us, too—and they checked what we transmitted against what we'd photographed going down. So they were able to spot the exact valley and tell us where to come down. We actually spotted this valley last night, but we couldn't land in the dark."
Cochrane felt abashed.