Cochrane glared at her. He didn't know how to take the comment. He said to Holden:
"Tomorrow we'll try to figure out some sort of test and try the air. I'll go out in a space-suit and crack the face-plate! I can close it again before anything lethal gets in. But there's no use stepping out into a bed of coals tonight. I'll have to wait till morning."
Holden smiled at him. Babs regarded him with intent, enigmatic eyes.
Neither of them said anything more. Cochrane finished his meal. Then he found himself without an occupation. Gravity on this planet was very nearly the same as on Earth. It felt like more, of course, because all of them had been subject only to moon-gravity for nearly three weeks. Jones and the pilot had been in one-sixth gravity for a much longer time. And the absence of gravity had caused their muscles to lose tone by just about the amount that the same time spent in a hospital bed would have done. They felt physically worn out.
It was a healthy tiredness, though, and their muscles would come back to normal as quickly as one recovers strength after illness—rather faster, in fact. But tonight there would be no night-life on the space-ship. Johnny Simms disappeared, after symptoms of fretfulness akin to those of an over-tired small boy. Jamison gave up, and Bell, and Al the pilot fell asleep while Jones was trying to discuss something technical with him. Jones himself yawned and yawned and when Al snored in his face he gave up. They retired to their bunks.
There was no point in standing guard over the ship. If the bed of hot ashes did not guard it, it was not likely that an individual merely sitting up and staring out its ports would do much good. There were extremely minor, practically unnoticeable vibrations of the ship from time to time. They would be volcanic temblors—to be expected. They were not alarming, certainly, and the forest outside was guarantee of no great violence to be anticipated. The trees stood firm and tall. There was no worry about the ship. It was perfectly practical, and even necessary simply to turn out the lights and go to sleep.
But Cochrane could not relax. He was annoyed by the soreness of his muscles. He was irritated by the picture given him of the expedition as a group of heedless ignoramuses who'd taken off without star-charts or bacteriological equipment—without even apparatus to test the air of planets they might land on!—and who now were sternly warned not to make any use of their achievement. Cochrane was not overwhelmed by the achievement itself, though less than eighteen hours since the ship and all its company had been aground on Luna, and now they were landed on a new world twice as far from Earth as the Pole Star.
It is probable that Cochrane was not awed because he had a television-producer's point of view. He regarded this entire affair as a production. He was absorbed in the details of putting it across. He looked at it from his own, quite narrow, professional viewpoint. It did not disturb him that he was surrounded by a wilderness. He considered the wilderness the set on which his production belonged, though he was as much a city man as anybody else. He went back to the control-room. With the ship standing on its tail that was the highest point, and as the embers burned out and the smoke lessened it was possible to look out into the night.
He stared at the dimly-seen trees beyond the burned area, and at the dark masses of mountains which blotted out the stars. He estimated them, without quite realizing it, in view of what they would look like on a television screen. When light objects in the control-room rattled slightly, he paid no attention. His rehearsal-studio had been rickety, back home.
Babs seemed to be sleepless, too. There was next to no light where Cochrane was—merely the monitor-lights which assured that the Dabney field still existed, though blocked for use by the substance of a planet. Babs arrived in the almost-dark room only minutes after Cochrane. He was moving restlessly from one port to another, staring out.