Well, the boy had lasted this far. During the tense moments of the lunar touchdown he hadn't cracked. He had responded to orders as if he were an electric relay. He had done his job. It had turned out that the landing crust was not weakened after all, but none of them had known that then. Duport had passed that test. Perhaps, the pilot thought, he was wrong about Duport, perhaps he was really what he seemed to be, cool and nerveless. At any rate, he would tell his suspicions to the medics, back on Ground. Time enough, he thought, time enough. * * * * * The research observer, the other American in the crew, had been busy taking pictures for several hours. He straightened from his camera sight, rubbed at his eyes, and stretched. "When we hit that ocean," he said in English, "I'm going to break out the raft, strip naked, and go for a swim, sharks or no...." "_Ta geule_," someone said, "shut up." The observer looked around, embarrassed at what he'd said. It was as if they were all superstitious, as if talking about Ground, even thinking about it, would bring bad luck. Each of them would have denied this hotly. But for a moment the observer looked as if he would have knocked on wood, had there been a piece of wood in the ship. After a minute the observer pulled out some processed film plates and began examining them through a lens. Rene Duport had looked up from his radio console. There was nothing for him to do at the moment. He thought that he would have liked to be in the observer's place, or the navigator's, able to look through one of the periscopes directly into deep space. He had loved the Moon, he had loved to suit up and walk out onto the lunar dust and look upward at the sky, at the stars that did not flicker, at the Magellanic Clouds, close enough to touch. But even there, on the surface of the Moon, he had always been standing on something. He thought of the vacuum that was all around the ship, on every side, just beyond the hull, just beyond the escape hatch behind his back. He wondered what it would be like to look directly into space, standing on nothing, to see not merely a dome of stars, but an entire sphere of them, bright and unblinking. All his life he had wanted to go into space, and all his life he had known that he would. Now he did not want to go back, he wished that he could leave the Earth forever. The research observer leaned toward the African engineer and began discussing one of the film plates with him. Rene Duport listened to them, only half interested. He thought that the African and the Russian were the only crewmen besides himself who could speak French without sounding ridiculous.