Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 Part 8

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 phosph.o.r.escence 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 pa.s.sage was over. The pa.s.sengers 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

_In the Helio-room_

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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sengers had retired and the ship quieted, I prowled through the pa.s.senger corridors. This was about the trinight hour.[3] Hot as the corridors of h.e.l.l, with our hull and the gla.s.site 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 s.p.a.ce striking us, it was hot air that was needed.

Dr. Frank evidently was having little trouble with pressure-sick pa.s.sengers[4]--the Planetara's equalizers were fairly efficient. I did not encounter Dr. Frank. I prowled through the silent metal lounges and pa.s.sages. I went to the door of A 22. It was on the deck-level, in a tiny transverse pa.s.sage 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--a.s.sociate of dubious Martians, plotting G.o.d 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? I told myself it was nonsense.

I was suspicious of everyone, everything, this voyage.

I heard another step. Captain Carter appeared from his chart-room which stood in the center of the narrowing open deck s.p.a.ce near the bow. I joined him at once.

"Who was that?" he half-whispered.

"Johnson."

"Oh, yes." He fumbled in his uniform; his gaze swept the moonlit deck.

"Gregg--take this." He handed me a small metal box. I stuffed it at once into my shirt.

"An insulator," he added, swiftly. "Snap is in his office. Take it to him, Gregg. Stay with him--you'll have a measure of security--and you can help him to make the photographs." He was barely whispering. "I won't be with you--no use making it look as though we were doing anything unusual. If your graphs show anything--or if Snap picks up any message--bring it to me." He added aloud, "Well, it will be cool enough presently, Gregg."

He sauntered away toward his chart-room.

"By heavens, what a relief!" Snap murmured as the current went on. We had wired his cubby with the insulator; within its barrage we could at last talk with a degree of freedom.

"You've seen George Prince, Gregg?"

"No. He's a.s.signed A 20. But I saw his sister. Snap, no one ever mentioned--"

Snap had heard of her, but he hadn't known that she was listed for this voyage. "A real beauty, so I've heard. Accursed shame for a decent girl to have a brother like that."

I could agree with him there, but I made no comment.

It was now 6 A. M. Snap had been busy all night with routine cosmo-radios from the earth, following our departure. He had a pile of them beside him. Many were for the pa.s.sengers; but anything that savored of a code was barred.

"Nothing queer looking?" I suggested.

"No. Not a thing."

We were at this time no more than some sixty-five thousand miles from the moon's surface. The Planetara presently would swing upon her direct course for Mars. There was nothing which could cause pa.s.senger comment in this close pa.s.sing of the moon; normally we used the satellite's attraction to give us additional starting speed.

It was now or never that a message would come from Grantline. He was supposed to be upon this earthward side of the moon. While Snap had rushed through with his routine, I had searched the moon surface with our gla.s.s, as I knew Carter was searching it--and also the observer in his tower, very possibly.

But there was nothing. Copernicus and Kepler lay in full sunlight. The heights of the lunar mountains, the depths of the barren, empty seas were etched black and white, clear and clean. Grim, forbidding desolation, this unchanging moon! In romance, moonlight may shimmer and sparkle to light a lover's smile; but the reality of the moon is cold and bleak. There was nothing to show my prying eyes where the intrepid Grantline might be.

"Nothing at all, Snap."