"It's stoo-pendous!" he said.
"Titan? Not any more so than—"
"Not Titan. You. You know everything, don't you? Pal—" Sparks shook his head. "I sure had you figgered wrong. I thought you was a soft-soaping dope. So then you got us off the Carefree onto the skiff, cooled Breadon like a herring, declared yourself It and made us like it—"
Greg said, "Nonsense! I just happened to—Oh, nonsense! Shall we go into our new home?" But he flushed.
By evening—Titan's short, grey shadowed evening, the only logical unit of duration by which they could live so long as they remained captive here—their new cave home began to take on some semblance of lived-inness.
Vegetation was abundant on the hillsides. Sparks and Tommy had gathered heaps of dry faggots while Greg built a crude stone fireplace underneath the fluevent Sparks had reported; shortly thereafter the women had a cheerful blaze crackling on the hearth, and mingled with its grateful warmth was the odor of a savory stew, welcome scent to the nostrils of five who had worked long and hard in gathering the vegetables that had gone into that potage.
"Eat nothing," Greg had warned, "dig nothing that does not show signs of having been eaten, dug or picked by wild animals. Later we can make chemical analysis of dubious foods to determine their edibility. For the present we will depend on the most certain test, the acceptance by other flesh-and-blood creatures."
He had also permitted that a single can of bouillon concentrate be used in the stew. "For flavoring. There is so little food in reserve that we must save it against the cold, dark days when we can't get out to gather supplies. Later on we'll have fresh meat."
He looked thoughtfully at Cuddles, sniffing, yapping excitedly by the fireplace, and Maud Andrews, with a swift, maternal gesture, swept the poodle into her arms and glared at him belligerently.
"Oh, no you don't! You'll eat me first!"