* * * * * Nodalictha said warmly, "You're a darling, Rhadampsicus! It was outrageous of those nasty creatures to intend to harm my pets! I'm glad you attended to them!" "And I'm glad you're pleased, my dear," Rhadampsicus said pleasantly. "Now shall we set out for home?" Nodalictha looked about the cosy landscape of the ninth planet of Cetis Gamma. There were jagged peaks of frozen air, and mountain ranges of water, solidified ten thousand aeons ago. There were frost-trees of nitrogen, the elaborate crystal formations of argon, and here a wide sweep of oxygen crystal sward, with tiny peeping wild crystals of deep-blue cyanogen seeming to grow more thickly by the brook of liquid hydrogen. And there was their bower; primitive, but the scene of a true honeymoon idyll. "I almost hate to go home, Rhadampsicus," Nodalictha said. "We've been so happy here. Will you remember it for always?" "Naturally," said Rhadampsicus. "I'm glad you've been happy." Nodalictha snuggled up to him and twined eye stalks with him. "Darling," she said softly, "you've been wonderful, and I've been spoiled, and you've let me be. But I'm going to be a very dutiful wife from now on, Rhadampsicus. Only it has been fun, having you be so nice to me!" "It's been fun for me, too," replied Rhadampsicus gallantly. Nodalictha took a last glance around, and each of her sixteen eyes glowed sentimentally. Then she scanned the far-distant spaceship in the shadow of the second planet from the now subsiding sun. "My pets," she said tenderly. "But--Rhadampsicus, what are they doing?" "They've discovered that the crew of their vehicle--they call it a space yacht--aren't dead, that they're only in suspended animation. And they've decided in some uneasiness that they'd better take them back to Earth to be revived." "How nice! I knew they were sweet little creatures!" Rhadampsicus hesitated a moment. "From the male's mind I gather something else. Since the crew of this space yacht was incapacitated, and they were--ah--not employed on it, he and your female will bring it safely to port, and, I gather that they have a claim to great reward. Ah--it is something they call 'salvage.' He plans to use it to secure other rewards he calls 'patents' and they expect to live happily ever after." "And," cried Nodalictha gleefully, "from the female's mind I know that she is very proud of him, because she doesn't know that you designed all the instruments he made, darling. She's speaking to him now, telling him she loves him very dearly." Then Nodalictha blushed a little, because in a faraway space yacht Cathy had kissed Lon Simpson. The process seemed highly indecorous to Nodalictha, so recently a bride.