"All x by me!" she retorted. "I might as well go home if you're going to sleep _all_ the time!" and she widened her expressive eyes at him impishly as she danced blithely back into the control room. As she went out she slammed his door with a resounding clang, and Stevens pried himself out of his bunk one joint at a time, dressed, and made himself presentable. "Gosh!" he yawned mightily as he joined the girl at breakfast. "I don't know when I've had such a gorgeous sleep. How do you get by on so little?" "I don't. I sleep a lot, but I do it every night, instead of working for four days and nights on end and then trying to make up all those four nights' sleep at once. I'm going to break you of that, too, Steve, if it's the last thing I ever do." "There might be certain advantages in it, at that," he conceded, "but sometimes you've got to do work when it's got to be done, instead of just between sleeps. However, I'll try to do better. Certainly it is a wonderful relief to get out of that mess, isn't it?" "I'll say it is! But I wish that those folks were more like people. They're nice, I think, really, but they're so ... so ... well, so ghastly that it simply gives me the blue shivers just to look at one of them!" "They're pretty gruesome, no fooling," he agreed, "but you get used to things like that. I just about threw a fit the first time I ever saw a Martian, and the Venerians are even worse in some ways--they're so clammy and dead-looking--but now I've got real friends on both planets. One thing, though, gives me the pip. I read a story a while ago--the latest best-seller thing of Thornton's named 'Interstellar Slush' or some such tr...." "Cleophora--An Interstellar Romance," she corrected him. "I thought it was wonderful!" "I didn't. It's fundamentally unsound. Look at our nearest neighbors, who probably came from the same original stock we did. A Tellurian can admire, respect, or like a Venerian, yes. But for _loving_ one of them--wow! Beauty is purely relative, you know. For instance, I think that you are the most perfectly beautiful thing I ever saw; but no Venerian would think so. Far from it. Any Martian that hadn't seen many of us would have to go rest his eyes after taking one good look at you. Considering what love means, it doesn't stand to reason that any Tellurian woman could possibly fall in love with any man not of her own breed. Any writer is wrong who indulges in interplanetary love affairs and mad passions. They simply don't exist. They _can't_ exist--they're against all human instincts." "Interplanetary--in this solar system--yes. But the Dacrovos were just like us, only nicer." "That's what gives me the pip. If our own cousins of the same solar system are so repulsive to us, how would we be affected by entirely alien forms of intelligence?"