From the radar room he watched the Plumie place an object in the air lock and withdraw. He watched from a scanner inside the ship as someone brought in what the Plumie had left. An electronics man bustled forward. He looked it over quickly. It was complex, but his examination suddenly seemed satisfying to him. But a grayish vapor developed and he sniffed and wrinkled his nose. He picked up a communicator.
“Sir, they’ve sent us a power-generator. Some of its parts are going bad in our atmosphere, sir, but this looks to me like a hell of a good idea for a generator! I never saw anything like it, but it’s good! You can set it for any voltage and it’ll turn out plenty juice!”
“Put it in helium,” snapped the skipper. “It won’t break down in that! Then see how it serves!”
In the radar room, Baird drew a deep breath. He went carefully to each of the screens and every radar. Diane saw what he was about, and checked with him. They met at the middle of the radar room.
“Everything’s checked out,” said Baird gravely. “There’s nothing else around. There’s nothing we can be called on to do before something happens. So ... we can ... act like people.”
Diane smiled very faintly.
“Not like people. Just like us.” She said wistfully: “Don’t you want to tell me something? Something you intended to tell me only after we got back to base?”
He did. He told it to her. And there was also something she had not intended to tell him at all—unless he told her first. She said it now. They felt that such sayings were of the greatest possible importance. They clung together, saying them again. And it seemed wholly monstrous that two people who cared so desperately had wasted so much time acting like professional associates—explorer-ship officers—when things like this were to be said ...
As they talked incoherently, or were even more eloquently silent, the ship’s ordinary lights came on. The battery-lamp went on.