got to do with it?"

That annoyed Healey still more. The Old Man had upheld his definition the first day. "If he hasn't got eyes, he can't be human, and if he isn't human, he can't be lonesome," Healey said defiantly.

The Old Man looked at him and said, "Hm."

It took them eleven days to make the trip back, but they were busy every minute. They had made exhaustive notes and had taken thousands of pictures with X-ray, infra-red, gamma-blue, beta-yellow, and with every known filter and device, and several hundred reels of microfilm. They had air samples, tons of geological specimens, core-drillings, temperature records, humidity readings, radiation records, and cosmic-ray counts.

The biologist had accumulated an astonishing mass of data for a man who had not been allowed to touch the subject, and he and the botanist section were busy together.

The W.C. radioed that they had prepared a base for the Phoebus at Havana, because Table Rock was too far out in the wilderness. They estimated that millions of people would be wherever the Phoebus might land and, to avoid a major disaster, they had to keep the crowds in a populated center where they could be handled.

When the Phoebus reached Earth, the reception was tremendous. The ship landed at the new spaceport that had been made over from an old trans-Atlantic airfield near the world capital, and the video said that fifteen million persons were in the streets when the men of the Phoebus marched to the assembly hall. But of the fifteen million, not one was an officer of the International Air Marines. It was something of a blow to Healey to realize that the Air Marines were still ignoring them. Captain Pickens noticed it, too, and the old gleam came in his eye that meant, "We aren't licked yet. We'll go to Andromeda and back if we have to."

He formally presented his report, which included all the written material and physical evidence from Mars—twelve thousand pounds of reports and photographs alone. Thirty-two scientists and their staffs had done a lot of speculating. Then the Council president informed them that every man on the Phoebus had been raised two grades—unofficially, of course, he hastened to add—but they had also in view of facing unknown dangers, etc., etc., been granted a lifetime allowance of full pay at the rate of their new respective ranks, without regard to any subsequent circumstances.

"They've been mighty swell," Admiral Pickens said when he and Captain 

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