"How many do you want? Don't be such a glory boy, get in right now!" * * * * * As he pulled himself along the line and up through the hatch he realized that not only had he been undisturbed while on the rock but he hadn't even considered the possibility of becoming frightened! Pleased with himself, he closed the hatch door, raising the current in each magnetic lock to sealing maximum. As soon as the last bolt was sucked into place, his suit started decompressing while chamber pressure mounted in precise compensation. For a second he thought he saw a white speck eddy out of the specimen box attached to his belt but another did not follow. Anyway, suit vizors had a way of clouding up on the inside during chamber compression and that could play funny tricks. Five minutes later, though, when he pulled off his helmet a little swarm of white specks welled up toward the ceiling. Then they were gone. _Funny_, he laughed to himself. "Funny, funny," he suddenly laughed aloud, "Talcum powder from the void!" There was Hartley's face at the window, peering anxiously at him, and, for some inexplicable reason, that sight was even funnier. Shaking helplessly, Cramer slapped his knee and kept pointing at the face. _Life is so wonderfully wonderful!_ he said to himself, unable to utter anything aloud now. _Wonderful wonderfully!_ After a while Hartley opened the door to the front cabin and helped him to his cockpit seat. "Sorry, old man," Cramer gasped happily. "Don't know why I did that." It was surprising how undisturbed by the private joke Hartley looked. He seemed to be too abstracted for that. "Feeling all right?" he finally asked. "Perfect!" Cramer grinned, greeting the galactic reaches with a wave of his hand. "Isn't it a beautiful universe? I think I could count all the visible light sources out there in ten minutes if I wanted to. No, I don't want to count anything but my blessings, I just want to look." "Not from here, though. This rock makes its crazy wobble into sunlight soon and I'd rather be off it when the surface starts heating up." Hartley eased the craft upwards, pulling her back a few dozen miles. Then he balanced the power exhausts into hover and took the specimen box from Cramer's belt. "You've got ecstasy of the space deeps, never can tell when that'll strike a man out there." He studied the little slate-blue chips inside. "You notice that white stuff, Will?" "First thought it was just vizor clouding." He was thinking with extraordinary clarity even though he still felt wildly elated. "Seemed to happen after the temperature moved above water-freezing."