A Fall of Moondust

“'"Forsooth, Sir Isaac, you are indeed a man of great knowledge. Yet, methinks there is much that a woman might teach you.”

“'"And what is that, my pretty maid?”

“'Mistress Nell blushed shyly.

“'"I fear,” she sighed, “that you have given your life to the things of the mind. You have forgotten, Sir Isaac, that the body, also, has much strange wisdom.”

“'"Call me 'Ike,'” said the sage huskily, as his clumsy fingers tugged at the fastenings of her blouse.

“'"Not here—in the palace!” Nell protested, making no effort to hold him at bay. “The King will be back soon!”

“'"Do not alarm yourself, my pretty one. Charles is roistering with that scribbler Pepys. We'll see naught of him tonight—“'”

If we ever get out of here, thought Pat, we must send a letter of thanks to the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl on Mars who is supposed to have written this nonsense. She's keeping everyone amused, and that's all that matters now.

No; there was someone who was definitely not amused. He became uncomfortably aware that Miss Morley was trying to catch his eye. Recalling his duties as skipper, he turned toward her and gave her a reassuring but rather strained smile.

She did not return it; if anything, her expression became even more forbidding. Slowly and quite deliberately, she looked at Sue Wilkins and then back at him.

There was no need for words. She had said, as clearly as if she had shouted it at the top of her voice: “I know what you've been doing, back there in the air lock.”

Pat felt his face flame with indignation, the righteous indignation of a man who had been unjustly accused. For a moment he sat frozen in his seat, while the blood pounded in his cheeks. Then he muttered to himself: “I'll show the old bitch.”

He rose to his feet, gave Miss Morley a smile of poisonous sweetness, and said just loudly enough for her to hear: “Miss Wilkins! I think we've forgotten something. Will you come back to the air lock?”

As the door closed behind them once more, interrupting the narration of an incident that threw the gravest possible doubts upon the paternity of the Duke of St. Albans, Sue Wilkins looked at him in puzzled surprise.

“Did you see that?” he said, still boiling.

“See what?”

“Miss Morley—”

“Oh,” interrupted Sue, “don't worry about her, poor thing. She's been eying you ever since we left the Base. You know what her trouble is.”

“What?” asked Pat, already uncomfortably sure of the answer.

“I suppose you could call it ingrowing virginity. It's a common complaint, and the symptoms are always the same. There's only one cure for it.”

The ways of love are strange and tortuous. Only ten minutes ago, Pat and Sue had left the air lock together, mutually agreed to remain in a state of chaste affection. But now the improbable combination of Miss Morley and Nell Gwyn, and the feeling that one might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb-as well as, perhaps, the instinctive knowledge of their bodies that, in the long run, love was the only defense against death—had combined to overwhelm them. For a moment they stood motionless in the tiny, cluttered space of the galley; then, neither knowing who moved first, they were in each other's arms.

Sue had time to whisper only one phrase before Pat's lips silenced her.

“Not here,” she whispered, “in the palace!”

CHAPTER 13

Chief Engineer Lawrence stared into the faintly glowing screen, trying to read its message. Like all engineers and scientists, he had spent an appreciable fraction of his life looking at the images painted by speeding electrons, recording events too large or too small, too bright or too faint, for human eyes to see. It was more than a hundred years since the cathode-ray tube had placed the invisible world firmly in Man's grasp; already he had forgotten that it had ever been beyond his reach.

Two hundred meters away, according to the infrared scanner, a patch of slightly greater warmth was lying on the face of this dusty desert. It was almost perfectly circular, and quite isolated; there were no other sources of heat in the entire field of view. Though it was much smaller than the spot that Lawson had photographed from Lagrange, it was in the right area. There could be little doubt that it was the same thing.

There was no proof, however, that it was what they were looking for. It could have several explanations; perhaps it marked the site of an isolated peak, jutting up from the depths almost to the surface of the Sea. There was only one way to find out.

“You stay here,” said Lawrence . “I'll go forward on Duster One. Tell me when I'm at the exact center of the spot.”

“D'you think it will be dangerous?”

“It's not very likely, but there's no point in us both taking a risk.”

Slowly, Duster One glided across to that enigmatically glowing patch—so obvious to the infrared scanner, yet wholly invisible to the eye.

“A little to the left,” Tom ordered. “Another few meters-you're nearly there—whoa!”