He went off to his hotel-room and was out cold before his head had drifted down to its pillow. But he was not pleased with himself. It annoyed him that his revolt against being an expendable employee had taken the form of acting like one of his former bosses in collecting ruthlessly for the brains--in the case of Jones--and the neurotic idiosyncrasies--in the case of Dabney--of other men. The gesture by which he had become independent was not quite the splendid, scornful one he'd have liked. The fact that this sort of gesture worked, and nothing else would have, did not make him feel better. But he slept. He dreamed that he was back at his normal business of producing a television show. Nobody but himself cared whether the show went on or not. The actual purpose of all his subordinates seemed to be to cut as many throats among their fellow-workers as possible--in a business way, of course--so that by their own survival they might succeed to a better job and higher pay. This is what is called the fine spirit of teamwork by which things get done, both in private and public enterprise. It was a very realistic dream, but it was not restful. While he slept, the world wagged on and the cosmos continued on its normal course. The two moons of Earth—one natural and one artificial—swung in splendid circles about their primary. The nine moons of Saturn spun about that planet’s divided rings. The red spot of Jupiter and the bands on that gas-giant world moved in orderly fashion about its circumference. Light-centuries away, giant Cepheid suns expanded monstrously and contracted again, rather more rapidly than their gravitational fields could account for. Double stars sedately swung about each other. Comets reached their farthest points and, mere aggregations of frigid jagged stones and metal, prepared for another plunge back into light and heat and warmth. And various prosaic actions took place on Luna. When Cochrane waked and went back to the hotel-room in use as an office, he found Babs talking confidentially to a woman--girl, rather--whom Cochrane vaguely remembered. Then he did a double take. He did remember her. Three or four years before she'd been the outstanding television personality of the year. She'd been pretty, but not so pretty that you didn't realize that she was a person. She was everything that Marilyn Winters was not--and she'd been number two name in television. Cochrane said blankly: "Aren't you Alicia Keith?" The girl smiled faintly. She wasn't as pretty as she had been. She looked patient. And an expression of patience, on a woman's face, is certainly not unpleasant. But it isn't glamorous, either. "I was," she said. "I married Johnny Simms." Cochrane looked at Babs. "They live up here," explained Babs. "I pointed him out at the swimming-pool the day we got here." "Wonderful," said Cochrane. "How--"