A passenger was near us–the Martian whom Dr. Frank had called Miko. He was loitering here, quite evidently watching this girl come aboard. But as I glanced at him he looked away and casually sauntered off.
The girl came up and reached the deck. “I am in A 22,” she told the carrier. “My brother came aboard two hours ago.”
Dr. Frank answered my whisper. “That’s Anita Prince.”
She was passing quite close to us on the deck, following the carrier, when she stumbled and very nearly fell. I was nearest to her. I leaped forward and caught her as she went down.
“Oh!” she cried.
With my arm about her, I raised her up and set her upon her feet again. She had twisted her ankle. She balanced herself upon it. The pain of it eased up in a moment.
“I’m–all right–thank you!”
In the dimness of the blue-lit deck, I met her eyes. I was holding her with my encircling arm. She was small and soft against me. Her face, framed in the thick, black hair, smiled up at me. Small, oval face–beautiful–yet firm of chin, and stamped with the mark of its own individuality. No empty-headed beauty, this.
“I’m all right, thank you very much–”
I became conscious that I had not released her. I felt her hands pushing at me. And then it seemed that for an instant she yielded and was clinging. And I met her startled, upflung gaze. Eyes like a purple night with the sheen of misty starlight in them.
I heard myself murmuring, “I beg your pardon. Yes, of course!” I released her.
She thanked me again and followed the carrier along the deck. She was limping slightly from the twisted ankle.
An instant, while she had clung to me–and I had held her. A brief flash of something, from her eyes to mine–from mine back to hers. The poets write that love can be born of such a glance. The first meeting, across all the barriers of which love springs unsought, unbidden–defiant, sometimes. And the troubadours of old would sing: “A fleeting glance; a touch; two wildly beating hearts–and love was born.”
I think, with Anita and me, it must have been like that…
I stood gazing after her, unconscious of Dr. Frank, who was watching me with his humorous smile. And presently, no more than a quarter beyond the zero hour, the Planetara got away. With the dome-windows battened tightly, we lifted from the landing stage and soared over the glowing city. The phosphorescence of the electronic tubes was like a comet’s tail behind us as we slid upward.
At the trinight hour the heat of our atmospheric passage was over. The passengers had all retired. The ship was quiet, with empty decks and dim, silent corridors. Vibrationless, with the electronic engines cut off and only the hum of the Martel magnetizers to break the unnatural stillness. We were well beyond the earth’s atmosphere, heading out in the cone-path of the earth’s shadow, in the direction of the moon.
CHAPTER III
At six A. M., earth Eastern time, which we were still carrying, Snap Dean and I were alone in his instrument room, perched in the network over the Planetara’s deck. The bulge of the dome enclosed us; it rounded like a great observatory window some twenty feet above the ceiling of this little metal cubby-hole.
The Planetara was still in the earth’s shadow. The firmament–black interstellar space with its blazing white, red and yellow stars–lay spread around us. The moon, with nearly all its disc illumined, hung, a great silver ball, over our bow quarter. Behind it, to one side, Mars floated like the red tip of a smoldering cigarillo in the blackness. The earth, behind our stern, was dimly, redly visible–a giant sphere, etched with the configurations of its oceans and continents. Upon one limb a touch of the sunlight hung on the mountain-tops with a crescent red-yellow sheen.
And then we plunged from the cone-shadow. The sun, with the leaping Corona, burst through the blackness behind us. The earth lighted into a huge, thin crescent with hooked cusps.
To Snap and me, the glories of the heavens were too familiar to be remarked. And upon this voyage particularly we were in no mood to consider them. I had been in the helio-room several hours. When the Planetara started, and my few routine duties were over, I could think of nothing save Halsey’s and Carter’s admonition: “Be on your guard. And particularly–watch George Prince.”
I had not seen George Prince. But I had seen his sister, whom Carter and Halsey had not bothered to mention. My heart was still pounding with the memory…
When the passengers had retired and the ship quieted, I prowled through the passenger corridors. This was about the trinight hour.3 Hot as the corridors of hell, with our hull and the glassite dome seething with the friction of our atmospheric flight. But the refrigerators mitigated that; the ventilators blasted cold air from the renewers into every corner of the vessel. Within an hour or two, with the cold of space striking us, it was hot air that was needed.
Dr. Frank evidently was having little trouble with pressure-sick passengers4– the Planetara’s equalizers were fairly efficient. I did not encounter Dr. Frank. I prowled through the silent metal lounges and passages. I went to the door of A 22. It was on the deck-level, in a tiny transverse passage just off the main lounging room. Its name-grid glowed with the letters: “Anita Prince.” I stood in my short white trousers and white silk shirt, like a cabin steward gawping. Anita Prince! I had never heard the name until this night. But there was magic music in it now, as I murmured it to myself. Anita Prince…
She was here, doubtless asleep, behind this small metal door. It seemed as though that little oval grid were the gateway to a fairyland of my dreams.
I turned away. And thought of the Grantline Moon Expedition stabbed at me. George Prince–Anita’s brother–he whom I had been told to watch. This renegade–associate of dubious Martians, plotting God knows what.
I saw, upon the adjoining door, “A 20, George Prince.” I listened. In the humming stillness of the ship’s interior there was no sound from these cabins. A 20 was without windows, I knew. But Anita’s room had a window and a door which gave upon the deck. I went through the lounge, out its arch, and walked the deck length. The deck door and window of A 22 were closed and dark.
The ten-foot-wide deck was dim with white starlight from the side ports. Chairs were here, but they were all empty. From the bow windows of the arching dome a flood of moonlight threw long, slanting shadows down the deck. At the corner where the superstructure ended, I thought I saw a figure lurking as though watching me. I went that way, but it vanished.
I turned the corner, went the width of the ship to the other side. There was no one in sight save the observer on his spider bridge, high in the bow network, and the second officer, on duty on the turret balcony almost directly over me.
As I stood and listened, I suddenly heard footsteps. From the direction of the bow a figure came. Purser Johnson.
He greeted me. “Cooling off, Gregg?”
“Yes,” I said.
He went past me and turned into the smoking room door nearby.
I stood a moment at one of the deck windows, gazing at the stars; and for no reason at all I realized I was tense. Johnson was a great one for his regular sleep–it was wholly unlike him to be roaming about the ship at such an hour. Had he been watching me?
Trinight Hour, i.e., 3 A. M.
Pressure sickness. Caused by the difficulty of maintaining a constantly normal air pressure within the vessel owing to the sudden, extreme changes from heat to cold.
