your coming look casual, Frank."

"Why the devil should I?" I told her. "Everyone in the Station knows how I chase you."

She didn't object when I kissed her. I liked the cool firmness of her lips, and the warm firmness of her body in my arms, and the way her disorderly lock of dull-blond hair fell across her forehead.

She wasn't pretty. Her mouth was too wide and her face had a little too much strength. No, she wasn't pretty—but she was beautiful.

She pushed me away. "I'm getting to like that a little too much, Frank."

"I wish you'd take me seriously," I complained.

She laughed. "Be reasonable! I'm twenty-nine years old to your twenty-seven, I'm a very plain girl, and we don't know each other at all. It's just propinquity."

I was annoyed because she always fended me off that way. But before I could argue, we heard a step on the stair. It was Varez who came up into the lookout. He smiled at us in his quiet way. He was a dark, soft-spoken young Costa Rican whom we all liked.

"Just the man I want to see," I said. "I have an emotional problem. It's Marie."

"What can I do about that, Drummond?" he countered.

Marie laughed. "Probably Frank wants you to order me to spend a week-end with him, when we return to Earth."

"You French all have evil minds," I told her. And then asked Varez, "Tell her she has to marry me."

Varez laughed softly. "Transuranic Station is like heaven in only one way—there is no giving in marriage. I can't help you, Drummond."

It struck me suddenly that he looked tired and depressed.

"What about Nils?" I asked. "Is he all right now?"

"I don't know," murmured the psychologist.

He peered out of the window at the terminator creeping like a tide of darkness across the ghastly lunar plain. In the Earthshine, distant craters fanged the star-specked sky.

"Can you tell us what Andersen meant by his talk in the lab?" Marie asked him soberly.

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