"Jack!"
"You're all right, honey."
She raised herself on her elbow and looked out through the unglazed window at the ordered streets of the great Luna Dome. "The Moon.... Jack, you did it!"
He snapped his fingers. He looked like a high-school kid. "Nothin' to it." She could see he was very proud. Very tired, too. He reached out to touch her.
She drew back. "You don't have to be sweet to me," she said quietly. "I understand how you must feel."
"Don't have to?" He rose, bent over her, and slid his arms around her. He put his face into the shadowed warmth between her hair and her neck and said, "Listen, egghead, there's no absolute scale for courage. We had a bad time, both of us. After it was over, and I had a chance to think, I used it trying to look at things through your eyes. And that way I found out that when you walked up that gangway, you did the bravest thing I've ever known anyone to do. And you did it for me. It doesn't matter what else happened. Sue told me a lot about you that I didn't know, darling. You're ... real huge for your size. As for the bad part of what happened—nothing like it can ever happen again, can it?"
He hugged her. After a time he reached down and touched her swelling waist. It was like a benediction. "He'll be born on the Moon," he whispered, "and he'll have eyes the color of all Earth when it looks out to the stars."
"She'll be born on the Moon," corrected Marcia, "and her name will be Sue, and ... and she'll be almost as good as her father."