"And I'm glad you're pleased, my dear," Rhadampsicus said pleasantly. "Now shall we set out for home?"
Nodalictha looked about the cosy landscape of the ninth planet of Cetis Gamma. There were jagged peaks of frozen air, and mountain ranges of water, solidified ten thousand aeons ago. There were frost-trees of nitrogen, the elaborate crystal formations of argon, and here a wide sweep of oxygen crystal sward, with tiny peeping wild crystals of deep-blue cyanogen seeming to grow more thickly by the brook of liquid hydrogen. And there was their bower; primitive, but the scene of a true honeymoon idyll.
"I almost hate to go home, Rhadampsicus," Nodalictha said. "We've been so happy here. Will you remember it for always?"
"Naturally," said Rhadampsicus. "I'm glad you've been happy."
Nodalictha snuggled up to him and twined eye stalks with him.
"Darling," she said softly, "you've been wonderful, and I've been spoiled, and you've let me be. But I'm going to be a very dutiful wife from now on, Rhadampsicus. Only it has been fun, having you be so nice to me!"
"It's been fun for me, too," replied Rhadampsicus gallantly.
Nodalictha took a last glance around, and each of her sixteen eyes glowed sentimentally. Then she scanned the far-distant spaceship in the shadow of the second planet from the now subsiding sun.
"My pets," she said tenderly. "But—Rhadampsicus, what are they doing?"
"They've discovered that the crew of their vehicle—they call it a space yacht—aren't dead, that they're only in suspended animation. And they've decided in some uneasiness that they'd better take them back to Earth to be revived."