Brigands of the Moon | Page 6

of the turret and clambered down the
spider ladder to the upper deck level. The head of the arriving incline was near us.
Preceded by two carriers who were littered with hand luggage, George Prince was
coming up the incline. He was closer now. I recognized him from the type we had seen in
Halsey's office.
And then, with a shock, I saw it was not so. This was a girl coming aboard. An arc light
over the incline showed her clearly when she was half way up. A girl with her hood
pushed back; her face framed in thick black hair. I saw now it was not a man's cut of hair;
but long braids coiled up under the dangling hood.
Dr. Frank must have remarked my amazed expression. "Little beauty, isn't she?"
"Who is she?"
We were standing back against the wall of the superstructure. 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 A22," she told the carrier. "My brother
came aboard a couple of 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 nearly
went down.
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 carriers along the deck. She was limping slightly.

An instant she had clung to me. 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
quizzical 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.

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 cubbyhole.
The Planetara was still in 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 cigar 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 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 radio
room several hours. When the Planetara started,