Lynn's arms went around him fiercely and shook him. "Silly. He's just a kid. I tried to let him down easy, but I certainly didn't promise to marry him."
A grin spread across Matt's face. His arms tightened. From the corner of his eye, he could see the unwinking green disk of Earth, silent, cold, and unbelievably far away.
During the next three months, they tore the radio down seven times and rebuilt it with infinite care. They tested every tube and circuit. They might as well have saved their time.
Not a single message reached them from Earth.
After three months they gave up trying at last and a queer sense of dread took possession of them as the earth slowly expanded.
Sparks was a wreck. He spent incredible stretches in the radio shack listening for a signal—any signal—from his dead instruments. The cook went berserk and stabbed one of the engineers. Dr. Gwathmey, the gentle, gray-haired psychologist, picked a fight with Pendergrast, the expedition's gentle, gray-haired anthropologist over the theory that life had resulted from spores drifting to Earth on light tides. The two old men had battled it out in the messroom with their fists.
They were all, Matt realized, strained, nervous, edgy....
On the seventh of May the Argus began to drop cautiously down through a blanket of clouds that hid the surface of Earth. Everyone was at the ports, but they were descending on the night side of the planet, and the clouds were like soup.
Nothing was to be seen.