Part 2

It promised not to diminish the mass of a single human being on Earth. All it needed was our sunlight. Locked up in the _Lyra_ and freezing to death it had been compelled to tap the nearest energy source, which happened to be us.

But on Earth it would tap the sunlight. It pointed out that the sunlight falling on one square foot of Earth would keep one of our big power plants running for a year, if we knew as much as the Mercurians did about radiant heat.

"I'll be no trouble at all, Rawley. And if you wish, I'll show you how to convert sunlight into useful energy. You won't need so many cyclotrons then. Before _I'd_ monkey with anything as unpredictable as a skinless atom I'd go jump in a lake."

I was no longer listening. There was something I had left unfinished and it suddenly seemed more important to me than anything a frog could say or do.

Going down in the jacket-lift to Sylvia I kept trying to recall just how I felt when it had cheated me out of something I was entitled to.

It didn't seem right to leave a kiss dangling in midair, and I was sure that Sylvia was feeling frustrated, too.

She was. She came into my arms in utter silence, and we did the kiss up brown, and stored it away in our memories for when we were eighty-eight.

"Darling," she said. "I'm glad we thought of that."

I felt better almost at once. They had sent me out from Earth with a pat on the back and a commission, and I was returning with the commander's niece in my arms and a story in my brain which the news syndicates would certainly want.

I'd ask a good price for it. Lunar honeymoons were expensive, and although Sylvia wasn't extravagant she liked orchids as well as the next girl and was just the right height to wear sables with grace.