The plane swung around in a level loop, not too tight to disturb the stomach much, and steadied out again. I couldn't judge how far we'd swung but Alice and me watched the green stars and after about a minute she said, "They're getting closer," and a little while later I said, "Yeah, for sure." I scanned the board. The green button--the cracking-plant button, to call it that--was locked down of course. The Atla-Hi button was up, glowing violet. All the other buttons were still up and _locked_ up--I tried them all again. * * * * * It was clear as day used to be. We could either go to Atla-Hi or we could go back where we'd started from. There was no third possibility. It was a little hard to take. You think of a plane as freedom, as something that will carry you anywhere in the world you choose to go, especially any paradise, and then you find yourself worse limited than if you'd stayed on the ground--at least that was the way it was happening to us. But Alice and me were realists. We knew it wouldn't help to wail. We were up against another of those "two" problems, the problem of two destinations, and we had to choose ours. _If we go back_, I thought, _we can trek on somewhere--anywhere--richer by the loot from the plane, especially that Survival Kit. Trek on with some loot we'll mostly never understand and with the knowledge that we are leaving a plane that can fly, that we are shrinking back from an unknown adventure_. _Also if we go back there's something else we'll have to face, something we'll have to live with for a little while at least that won't be nice to live with after this cozily personal cabin, something that shouldn't bother me at all but, dammit, it does._ Alice made the decision for us and at the same time showed she was thinking about the same thing as me. "I don't want to have to smell him, Ray," she said. "I am not going back to keep company with that filthy corpse. I'd rather anything than that." And she pushed the Atla-Hi button again and as the plane started to swing she looked at me defiantly as if to say I'd reverse the course again over her dead body. "Don't tense up," I told her. "I want a new shake of the dice myself." "You know, Alice," Pop said reflectively, "it was the smell of my Alamoser got to me too. I just couldn't bear it. I couldn't get away from it because my fever had me pinned down, so there was nothing left for me to do but go crazy. No Atla-Hi for me, just Bug-land. My mind died, though not my memory. By the time I'd got my strength back I'd started to be a new bugger. I didn't know no more about living than a newborn babe, except I knew I couldn't go back--go back to murdering and all that. My new mind knew that much though otherwise it was just a blank. It was all very funny."