Cochrane forced his face to impassiveness. Johnny Simms was that way, he understood. He was a psychopathic personality. He was completely insensitive to notions of ethics. Ideas of right and wrong were as completely meaningless to him as tones to a tone-deaf person, or pastel tints to a man who is color-blind. They simply didn't register. His mind was up to par, and he could be a charming companion. He could experience the most kindly of emotions and most generous of impulses, which he put into practice. But he also had a normal person's impulse to less admirable behavior, and he simply could not understand that there was any difference between impulses. He put the unpleasing ones into practice too. He'd been on the moon to avoid extradition because of past impulses which society called murderous. On this ship it was yet to be discovered what he would do—but because he was technically sane his lawyers could have prevented a take off unless he came along. Cochrane, at the moment, felt an impulse to heave him out an airlock as a probable danger. But Cochrane was not a psychopathic personality.
He stopped Bell in his picture-taking and looked at the first of the prints. They were excellent. He went back to the vision-set to transmit them back to Luna. He sent them off. They would be forwarded to observatories on Earth and inspected. They literally could not be faked. There were thousands of stars on each print—with the Milky Way for background on some—and each of those thousands of stars would be identified, and each would have changed its relative position from that seen on earth, with relation to every other star. Astronomers could detect the spot from which the picture had been taken. But to fake a single print would have required years of computation and almost certainly there would have been slip-ups somewhere. These pictures were unassailable evidence that a human expedition had reached a point in space that had been beyond all human dreaming.
Then Cochrane had nothing to do. He was a supernumerary member of the crew. The pilot and Jones were in charge of the ship. Jamison would take care of the catering, when meal-time came. Probably Alicia Keith—no, Alicia Simms—would help. Nothing else needed attention. The rockets either worked or they didn't. The air-apparatus needed no supervision. Cochrane found himself without a function.
He went restlessly back to the control-room. He found Babs looking helpless, and Jones staring blankly at a slip of paper in his hands, while the pilot was still at a blister-port, staring at the stars through one of those squat, thick telescopes used on Luna for the examination of the planets.
"How goes the research?" asked Cochrane.
"We're stumped," said Jones painfully. "I forgot something."
"What?"
"Whenever I wanted anything," said Jones, "I wrote it out and gave a memo to Babs. She attended to it."
"My system, exactly," admitted Cochrane.
"I wrote out a memo for her," said Jones unhappily, "asking for star-charts and for her to get somebody to set up a system of astrogation for outside the solar system. Nobody's ever bothered to do that before. Nobody's ever reached even Mars! But I figured we'd need it."