He left the communicator-board. 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. His expression was amiable and unawed.
"Hello," said Johnny Simms cheerfully.
Cochrane nodded curtly.
"I bought West's stock in Spaceways," said Johnny Simms, amusedly, "because I want to come along. Right?"
"So I heard," said Cochrane, as curtly as before.
"West said," Johnny Simms told him gleefully, "that he was going back to Earth, punch Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe on their separate noses, and then go down to South Carolina and raise edible snails for the rest of his life."
"An understandable ambition," said Cochrane. He frowned, waiting to talk to Bell, who was taking an infernally long time to focus a camera out of a side-port.
"It's going to be good when he tries to cash my check," said Johnny Simms delightedly. "I stopped payment on it when he wouldn't pick up the tab for some drinks I invited him to have!"