"Enough," he declared, "is too much. I wasn't hot on this trip from the start. Now I'm an Eskimo. Sparks, take a message to Long Island Spaceport. Tell 'em--" "Tell them," interrupted Lorraine Larkin, "that the captain and crew of the _Pegasus_ are on their way to find out what happened to those other poor fellows who tried to land on Caltech VI. And tell them we _will_ find out, because we're the toughest, smartest, space-lickingest gang of etherhounds who ever lifted gravs. And there's nothing between here and Procyon that can scare us. Mmmm! What delicious soup--" That stopped them. That stopped them cold. Bowman looked thoughtful, one gnarled hand caressed his jowls. Larkin stopped trying to talk, a curious look came into his eyes. Tom Anderson's shoulders stiffened; old MacPhee, the Chief Engineer, dragged out a filthy, oil-smeared handkerchief, blew his nose viciously and said, "Grrrumph!" Me, I was stunned speechless, too. Oh, not because she had reminded me we had a moral obligation to find out what had happened to the previous explorers. It wasn't that she'd roused in me any latent spark of pride in the _Pegasus_, either. What got me was her calling the soup 'delicious'! Good golly, that stuff? Delicious? * * * * * So we went on, and Lorraine Larkin went with us. I don't have to tell you about the trip; you can get that from the log book. It was sixteen days to the Mars ecliptic, but Mars wasn't there, of course. It was sky-hooting along four weeks to sta-board. Little things happened, none important. The outstanding thing about the trip was the dopey way our one time sane and sensible first mate, Johnny Larkin, was behaving. He had apparently reconciled himself to the idea of Lorraine's being with us. Reconciled? Whoops! He was closer to his bride than twelve o'clock sharp. Everywhere you saw Lorraine, there was Johnny, and vice versa. Then we hit the highroad between Mars and the asteroids, the great open spaces in which Caltech had taken squatters' rights. Bob Weir punched keys on the astrocalculator and figured it would take us a week and a half to reach our destination. I wasn't sure I could last that long. For why? One guess. Lt. and Mrs. J. Larkin. Their billing and cooing was enough to make a Martian canal-pussie blush green. Every time you saw Johnny he was playing octopus with Lorraine's hand. He had dawn and soft breezes in his eyes when he looked at her, and the glances she heaved back weren't exactly typhoons at midnight. The worst part is, they didn't seem to have a bit of shame! They didn't care whether anybody saw them acting like melted cheese sandwiches or not. And oh! what they said! He called her "Lovums"; she called him "Cutsie," which was all wrong, "Bugsie," which was one hundred per cent right, and a lot of other names too nauseating to mention.