* * * * *
He paced up and down and up and down. They were remarkably unlike
castaways in the space tale magazines. In those works of fiction, the
hero is always remarkably ingenious. He contrives shelters from native
growths on however alien a planet he and the heroine may have been
marooned; he is full of useful odd bits of information which enable
him to surprise her with unexpected luxuries, and he is inspired when
it comes to signaling devices. But in five days on this planet, Stan
had been able to make no use of any natural growth because there
weren't any. He'd found no small luxuries for Esther because there was
literally nothing about but sand. And there was strikingly little use
in a fund of odd bits of information when there was only desert to
apply it to--desert and sandstorms.
What he'd just told Esther was a guess; the best guess he could make,
and a plausible one, but still a guess. The only new bit of information
he'd picked up so far was the way the local inhabitants made electric
motors. And he had to bet his and Esther's life on that!
He watched the chrono. And a good half hour before night would strike
the checkerboard grid, he was verifying what few preparations he could
make. A little later he waked Esther. And just about twenty minutes
before the sunset line would reach the grid, they soared upward to
seek it. If Stan's plan didn't work, they'd die. He was going to
gamble their lives and the last morsel of power the skid's power unit
contained, on information gained in two peeps at slab-motors on the
grid, and the inference that all motors on this planet would be made
on the same principle. Of course, as a subsidiary gamble, he had also
to bet that he in an unarmed and wrecked space yacht could defy a
civilization that had lived since before Khor Alpha was a dwarf star.
They soared out of atmosphere on a trajectory that saved power but was
weirdly unlike any normal way of traveling from one spot on a planet's
surface to another. Beneath them lay the vast expanse of the desert,
all dense, velvety black except for one blindingly bright area at its
western rim. That bright area widened as they neared it, overtaking the
day. Suddenly the rectangular edges of the grid shed appeared, breaking
the sharp edge of dusk.
The _Erebus_ had grounded about fifty miles northward from the planet's
solitary structure. Stan turned on his suit-radio and listened
intently. There was no possible landmark. The dunes changed hourly
during the day and on no two days were ever the same. He skimmed the
settling sand clouds of the dusk belt. Presently he was sure he had
overshot his mark.
He circled. He circled again. He made a great logarithmic spiral out
from the point he considered most likely. The power meter showed the
drain. He searched in the night, with no possible landmark. Sweat came
out on his face.
Then he heard a tiny click. Sweat ran down his face. He worked
desperately to localize the signal Esther had set to working in the
yacht before she left it. When at last he landed and was sure the
_Erebus_ was under the starlit sand about him, he looked at the power
gauge and tensed his lips. He pressed his space helmet close to
Esther's, until it touched. He spoke, and his voice carried by metallic
conduction without the use of radio.
"We might make it if we try now. But we're going to need a lot of power
at best. I'm going to gamble the local yokels can't trace a skid drive
and wait for morning, to harness the whirlwinds to do our digging for
us."
Her voice came faintly back to him by the same means of communication.
"All right, Stan."
She couldn't guess his intentions, of course. They were probably
insane. He said urgently:
"Listen! The yacht's buried directly under us. Maybe ten feet, maybe
fifty, maybe Heaven knows how deep! There's a bare chance that if we
get to it we can do something, with what I know now about the machines
in use here. It's the only chance I know, and it's not a good one. It's
only fair to tell you--"
"I'll try anything," said her voice in his helmet, "with you."
He swallowed. Then he stayed awake and desperately alert, his
suit-microphones at their highest pitch of sensitivity, during the long
and deadly monotonous hours of the night.
There was no alarm. When the sky grayed to the eastward, he showed her
how he hoped to reach the yacht. The drive of the skid, of course,
was not a pulsatory field such as even the smallest of space yachts
used. It was more nearly an adaptation of a meteor-repeller beam, a
simple reactive thrust against an artificial-mass field. It was the
first type of drive ever to lift a ship from Earth. For take-off and
landing and purposes like meteor mining it is still better than the
pulsating-field drive by which a ship travels in huge if unfelt leaps.
But in atmosphere it does produce a tremendous black-blast of repelled
air. It is never used on atmosphere-flyers for that very reason, but
Stan proposed to make capital of its drawback for his purpose.
When he'd finished his explanation, Esther was more than a little pale,
but she smiled gamely.
"All right, Stan. Go ahead!"
"We'll save power if we wait for the winds," he told her.
Already, though, breezes stirred across the dawn-lit sand. Already they
were hot breezes. Already the fine, impalpable sand dust which settled
last at nightfall was rising in curious opaque clouds which billowed
and curled and blotted out the horizon. But the grid was hidden by the
bulge of the planet's surface.
Stan pointed the little skid downward in a hollow he scooped out with
his space-gloved hands. He set the gyros running to keep it pointed
toward the buried yacht. He had Esther climb up behind him. He lashed
the two of them together, and strapped them to the skid. And he waited.
In ten minutes after the first sand grains pelted on his armor, the sky
was hidden by the finer dust. In twenty there were great gusts which
could be felt even within the space suits. In half an hour a monster
gale blew.
Stan turned on the space skid's drive. It thrust downward toward the
sand and the buried yacht. It thrust upward against the air and pelting
sand.
In three-quarters of an hour the sandstorm had reached frenzied
violence--but the skid pushed down from within a little hollow. Its
drive thrust up a spout of air. That spout drew sand grains with it.
But it was needful to increase the power. After an hour a gigantic
whirlwind swept around them. It tore at the two people and the tiny
machine. It sucked up such a mass of powdery sand particles that their
impact on the space suits was like a savage blow.
Emptiness opened beneath the skid as sand went whirling up in a
sandspout the exact equivalent of a waterspout at sea. Stan and Esther
and the skid itself would have been torn away by its violence but that
the skid's drive was on full, now. The absurd little traveler thrust
sturdily downward. When sand was drawn away by wind, it burrowed down
eagerly to make the most of its gain.
Its back-thrust kept a steady, cone-shaped pressure on the sand which
would have poured in upon it. Stan and Esther were buried and uncovered
and buried again, but the skid fought valorously. It strove to dig
deeper and to fling away the sand that would have hidden it from view.
It remained, actually, at the bottom of a perpetually filling pit which
it kept from filling by a geyser of upflung sand from its drive.
* * * * *
In twenty minutes another whirlwind touched the pit briefly. The
skid--helped by the storm--dug deeper yet. There came other swirling
maelstroms....
The nose of the skid touched solidity. It had burrowed down nearly
fifty feet, with the aid of whirlwinds, and come to the yacht _Erebus_.
But it was another hour before accident and fierce efforts on Stan's
part combined to let him reach the air-lock door, and maneuver the skid
to keep that doorway clear, and for Esther to climb in--followed by
masses of slithering sand--and Stan after her.
Inside the buried yacht, Stan fumbled for lights. He made haste to
turn off the signaling device that had led him back to it deep under
the desert's surface. And it was strangely and wonderfully still here,
buried under thousands of tons of sand.
Esther slipped out of her space suit and smiled tremulously at Stan.
"Now?"
"Now," said Stan, "if you want to, you can start cooking. We could do
with a civilized meal. And I'll see what I can do toward a slightly
less uncertain way of life."
He went forward. The _Erebus_ was a small yacht, to be sure. It was
a bare sixty feet over-all, and of course as a pleasure craft it had
no actual armament. But within two bulging blisters at the bow the
meteor-repellers were mounted. In flight, in space, they could make
a two-way thrust against stray bits of celestial matter, so that if
a meteor was tiny it was thrust aside, or if too large the _Erebus_
swerved away.
From within, Stan changed the focus of the beams. They had been set
to send out tiny reaction beams no larger than a rifle bore. At ten
miles such a beam would be six inches across, and at forty a bare two
feet. He adjusted both to a quickly widening cone and pointed one up,
the other down. One would thrust violently against the sand under the
yacht, and the other against the sand over it. The surface sand, at
least, could rise and be blown away. The sand below would support the
yacht against further settling.
He went back to where Esther laid out dishes.
"I've started something," he told her. "One repeller beam points up to
make the sand over our heads effectively lighter so it can be blown
away more easily. The storm ought to burrow right down to us, with
that much help. After we're uncovered, we may, just possibly, be able
to work the ship up to the surface. But after that we've got to do
something else. The repellers aren't as powerful as a drive, and it's
hardly likely we could lift out of gravity on them. Even if we did,
we're a few light-centuries from home. To fix our interstellar drive we
need the help of our friends of the grid."
Esther paused to stare.
"But they'll try to kill us!" she protested. "They've tried hard! And
if they find us we've no weapons at all--not even a hand-blaster!"
"To the contrary," said Stan dryly, "we've probably the most ghastly
weapon anybody ever invented--only it won't work on any other planet
than this."
Then he grinned at her. Now, he too was out of his space suit. The food
he'd asked her to prepare was out on the table, but he ignored it. He
took one step toward her. And then there came a muffled sound, picked
up by the outside hull-microphones. It grew in volume. It became a
roar. Then the yacht shifted position. Its nose tilted upward.
"The first step," said Stan, "is accomplished. I can't stop to dine.
But--"
He kissed her hungrily. Five days--six, now--in space suits with the
girl one hopes to marry has its drawbacks. An armored arm around the
hulking shoulders of another suit of armor--even with a pretty girl
inside it--is not satisfying. To hold hands with three-eighth-inch
space gloves is less than romantic. And to try to kiss a girl
three-quarters buried in a space helmet leaves much to the imagination.
Stan kissed her. It took another shifting movement of the yacht, which
toppled them the length of the cabin, to make him stop.
Then he laughed and went to the control room.
Vision screens were useless, of course. The little ship was still most
of her length under sand, but the repellers' cones of thrust had dug a
great pit down to her. Now Stan juggled the repellers to take fullest
advantage of the storm. At times--with both beams pushing up--the ship
was perceptibly lifted by uprushing air. And Stan could be prodigal
with power, now. The skid was sharply limited in its storage of energy,
but all the space between the two skins of the _Erebus_ was a power
bank. It could travel from one rim of the Galaxy to the other without
exhausting its store. And the upward lift of whirlwinds--once there
were six within ten minutes--and the thrusts of the repellers gradually
edged the _Erebus_ to the surface.
Before nightfall it no longer lay in a sand pit. It was only half
buried in sand. And when the winds died down to merely savage gales,
at twilight, and then slowly diminished to more angry gusts, and at
long last there was calm without and even the impalpable fine dust that
settled last no longer floated in the air, and the stars shone--then
Stan was ready.
He turned on the ship's communicator and sent a full-power wave out
into the night. He spoke. What he said would be unintelligible, of
course, but he said sardonically to the empty desert:
"Yacht _Erebus_ calling! Down on the desert, every drive smashed, and
not so much as a hand-blaster on board for a weapon. Maybe you'd like
to come and get us!"
Then--and only then--he went and ate the long delayed meal Esther had
made ready.
It was half an hour before the microphones gave warning. Then they
relayed clankings and poundings and thuddings on the sand. It was the
sound of heavy machines marching toward the _Erebus_. Scores of them.
The machines separated and encircled the disabled yacht, though they
were invisible behind the dunes all about. And then, simultaneously,
they closed in.
The landing beams of the _Erebus_ flashed out. Light flickered in the
chill darkness. The beams darted here and there.
Then the machines appeared. The scene was remarkable. Over the dunes
marched gigantic metal monsters, many-legged, with bodies as great as
the _Erebus_ itself. Great bulges on their forward parts gave the look
of eyes, as if these were huge insects marching to devour and destroy.
As the landing-light beams flickered from one to another of them, huge
metallic tusks appeared, and toothed jaws--used for excavation. They
were not machines designed for war, but they were terrifying, and they
could be terrible.
Esther's hand on Stan's shoulder trembled as the monsters closed in.
And then Stan, in the unarmed and seemingly defenseless little space
yacht, swung the meteor-repeller controls and literally cut them to
pieces.
"We're barbarians," said Stan, "compared to these folk. So we've an
advantage. It's likely to be only temporary, though!"
* * * * *
He watched the carcasses of the great machines, flicking the
landing-light beams back and forth. They were tumbled terribly on the
ground. Some were severed in two or three places, and their separate
sections sprawled astonishedly on a dune-side. One was split through
lengthwise. Another had all of one set of legs cut off clean, and lay
otherwise unharmed but utterly helpless.
Out of that incapacitated giant a smaller version of itself crawled.
It was like a lifeboat. Stan watched. Other small versions of the
great machines appeared. One made a dash at the _Erebus_, and he
cut it savagely in two. There was no other attack. Instead, the
smaller many-legged machines ran busily from one to another of the
wrecks--seeming to gather up survivors--and then went racing away into
the dark.
Then there was stillness.
"They knew we saw them," said Stan grimly. "They knew we could smash
them. And they realized that we wouldn't unless they attacked again. I
wonder what they think of us now?"
"What you did to them was--awful," said Esther. She shuddered. "I still
don't know what it was. I never heard of any weapon like that!"
"It could only exist here," said Stan. He grimaced. "We've
meteor-repellers. They push away anything in their beam. I narrowed
them to their smallest size and put full power into them. That was all."
"But meteor-repellers don't cut!" protested Esther.
"These did," said Stan. "They were working through sand, just that.
They pushed it. With a force of eighty tons in a half-inch beam.
The sand that was in the beam was shot away with an acceleration of
possibly fifty thousand gravities--and more sand kept falling into the
beam. Each particle was traveling as fast as a meteor when it hit,
over there. When it struck, it simply flared to incandescent vapor. No
atomic torch was ever hotter! And there was no end to the sand I threw.
You might say I cut those machines up with a sand blast, but there was
never such a sand blast as this! It took a barbarian--like me--to think
of it!
"Now," he added, "I need to go over to those machines and get some
stuff I think they've got in them. That's what I provoked this attack
for. But maybe the drivers are laying low to jump on me if I try it.
I'll have to wait until nearly dawn. They won't risk waiting until
almost time for the sandstorms! Not with fifty miles to travel back to
the grid!"
He stayed on guard. Presently he yawned. He stood up and paced back
and forth, glancing from time to time at the screen. After a long time
Esther said:
"You didn't sleep last night, Stan. Could I watch for a while so you
can rest?"
"M'm-m. Yes. If anything stirs, wake me. But I don't look for action
here. The real action will be back underground."
He went back into the cabin and threw himself down. Almost instantly
he was asleep. Esther watched the vision-plates dutifully. There was
silence and stillness everywhere. After a long time she looked in on
the sleeping Stan. A little later she looked in again, reached over,
and touched his hair gently. Later still she looked in yet again. She
kissed him lightly--he did not wake--and went back to the control
cabin, to watch the vision-plates.
Nothing happened.
Out in space, though, very many millions of miles away, a tiny mote
winked into existence as if by magic, with the cutting off of its
Bowdoin-Hall field drive. It hung seemingly motionless for a while, as
if orienting itself. It seemed to locate what it sought--and vanished,
but again winked into being a bare few thousand miles from the planet's
surface.
It did not disappear again. It drove down toward the half-obscured disk
at the normal acceleration of a landing drive. Toward dawn it screamed
down into atmosphere above the planet's surface. It drove on into the
day, and into howling winds and far-flung sand. It rose swiftly, and
went winging toward the summer polar cap.
Khor Alpha's single planet had gone unvisited by men during two
centuries of interstellar travel, but now there had been three separate
visitations within ten days.
The last of the three visitors settled to ground where hoarfrost partly
whitened the desert's face. A full-power carrier-wave spread out from
it. And in the control room of the _Erebus_ a speaker suddenly barked
savagely:
"Stan Buckley! I'm here to kill you! Communicate!"
Esther gasped. She recognized the voice. Rob Torren! Back more than
two months before Stan had expected him! The words did not make sense
to her. Stan had tried to spare her despair by concealing the fact
that Torren's return would be to kill him, under a compact which her
presence here made void.
"Rob!" cried Esther softly into the transmitter. "Rob Torren! It's
Esther calling! Esther Hume!"
An indescribable sound from the speaker. With trembling hands she
adjusted the vision receiver. She looked into the taut, drawn, raging
features of Rob Torren. He stared at her out of the screen.
"Stan's asleep, Rob!" cried Esther eagerly. "He didn't expect you back
for a long time yet! You're wondering how I got here? Oh--"
Laughing a little, joyously, she told of her desperate voyage to be
with Stan when he should be tried, and how her drive had been burnt out
by impinging on the drive of the space skid on which Stan had left the
_Stallifer_. And of course she told of her subsequent meeting with Stan.
"And there are inhabitants here," she finished eagerly, "and they've
been trying to kill us."
She was all joy and relief at Torren's arrival. But his face was
ravaged by conflicting emotions, all of them intense and all harrowing.
"But--what's the matter, Rob?" she asked. "You look so queer!" Then she
added in abrupt, startled doubt. "And Rob! Why did you say you had come
back to kill Stan? You were joking, weren't you?"
He raged at her instantly. "He coached you, eh? To pretend you didn't
know anything? Trying to make me take you both to safety on a promise
of fighting me later? It won't work! I've a line on your wave and I'll
be coming! I'll be coming fast! And maybe you've no weapons, but I
have! I've a Space Guard one-man ship! I forced the _Stallifer_ to dock
at Lora Beta and put me ashore! I got this ship to hunt back for Stan,
claiming his recapture as my responsibility! I did plan to have him
write you a letter before I killed him, but since you know everything
now--"
She saw the beginning of an infuriated movement. Then the screen went
blank.
After a moment's frightened irresolution she went to Stan. She woke
him, and after the first three words he was sternly alert.
"This sets things up nicely!" he said bitterly. "You didn't know about
him, of course, but--our friends of the grid are concocting weapons
to destroy us, and now he's streaking here along his locator line to
blast us with everything a Space Guard ship can carry! And he'll have
long-range stuff! He can burn us to a crisp if we put a repeller beam
on him! We can't sand-blast him! We can't--"
He began to struggle swiftly into a space suit. Esther said:
"Wherever you're going, I'm going too!"
"You're not!" he said harshly. "You'll go in the control room with your
hands on the beam controls. If some of the local citizens are hiding in
those wrecks, you'll smash them if they jump me! I haven't so much as a
pocketknife! You've got to be my weapons while I dig into those wrecks!"
* * * * *
He went swiftly out the air-lock with only a cutting-torch in his
hands. He fairly ran toward the débris of the attacking army of
machines. He reached the first. It had been sliced longitudinally in
half by a stream of sand particles traveling at fifty miles or better
per second, in a stream of air of the same velocity. Nothing could have
withstood such an attack. No material substance in the universe could
have resisted it. Four-inch plates of steel and foot-thick girders had
been cut through like so much dough, the severed edges gone not to
liquid but to vapor in the deadly stream.
The whole mechanism of the machine was exposed. The great biting jaws,
designed to tear away huge masses of intermingled sand and ice. The
tusks to break loose sections for the jaws to handle. The tanks to
contain the precious damp material. The machine had not been made for
fighting, but it, alone, could have torn the _Erebus_ to fragments.
With an army of such machines--
Stan clambered into the neatly halved shell with his cutting-torch. All
about him were small devices, cryptic things, the strictly practical
contrivances of a hundred-thousand-year-old civilization. He itched
to examine them, but he needed certain bars of allotropic graphite
he suspected would be here. They were. The motors which ran the leg
movements were motors like those which turned the great slabs. They
consisted of slabs of graphite and the metal which slid past them. That
was all. Only one special allotrope of graphite makes a motor of such
simplicity. Only--
He burdened himself with black, flaky bars, cutting ruthlessly through
machinery to which an engineer would have devoted months of study. He
had an even dozen of the bars in his arms when a sudden blast rocked
him. He whirled, and saw a small cloud of still incandescent vapor and
Something which was separating horribly into many steaming pieces.
Other Things seemed to leap to smother him under their weight. He could
not see them save as vague shapes, but he knew they were there.
Another exploded as Esther, in the _Erebus_ and watching with the
infrared scanner, desperately used the weapon which had never existed
before and could not be used anywhere save on this one planet.
Stan ran clumsily for the ship over the drifting, powdery sand.
Inhumanly resolute unhuman things leaped after him. He saw the flares
as Esther destroyed them. He knew that she was wide eyed and trembling
and sick with horror at what she had to do.
But he stumbled into the air-lock and dogged it shut behind him. And
Esther came running to greet him, not shaking and not trembling and not
horrified, but with burning eyes and the fiery anger of a Valkyrie. She
was not wearing her space suit.
"They tried to kill you!" she cried fiercely. "They were hiding!
They'd have murdered you--"
He put down his bars of allotropic graphite. He reached out to take her
in his arms. But--
"Damn these space suits!" he said furiously. "You'll have to wait to be
kissed until this job's finished!"
He tore up the flooring hatch above the little ship's drive. He jerked
off the housing.
"Keep watch!" he called to the control room. "At least one of the
machines must be waiting behind the dunes, hoping for a break!"
He worked with frantic haste, shedding his space suit by convulsive
movements. This should have been the most finicky of fine-fitting
jobs. To repair a Bowdoin-Hall drive unit by replacing its graphite
bars for maximum efficiency is a matter for micrometric precision.
But efficiency was not what he wanted, now, but speed. And these bars
almost fitted. They were vastly unlike the five-hundred-pound monsters
for the grid slabs. These should at least move the ship, and if the
ship could be moved--
He had two of them in place and six more to go when the speaker in the
control room blared triumphantly.
"Stan Buckley! Tune in! I'm right above your ship! Tune in!"
Stan swore in a sick disgust. Two out of eight was not enough. He was
helpless for lack, now, of time. And the corrosive hatred that comes
of helplessness filled him. He went into the control room and said
drearily to Esther:
"Sorry, my dear. Another twenty minutes and you'd have been safe. I
think we lose."
He kissed her, and with fury-steadied fingers tuned in the
communication-plate. Rob Torren grinned furiously at him.
"I thought I'd let you know what's happening," said Torren in a voice
that was furry with whipped-up rage. "I'm going to go back and report
that you were killed resisting arrest. I'm going to melt down the yacht
until it could never be identified as the _Erebus_--if anybody ever
sees it again! And--maybe you'll enjoy knowing that I did the things I
charged you with, and have the proceeds safely banked away! I faked the
evidence that proved it on you. And I hoped to have Esther, too, but
she's spoiled that by trying to come and help you! Now--"
"Now," said Stan coldly, "you'll stand off a good twenty miles and beam
us. You'll take no chances that we might be able to throw a handful
of sand at you! You'll be so damned cautious that you won't even come
close to see your success with your own eyes! You'll read it off on
instruments! You're pretty much afraid of me!"
"Afraid?" raged Rob Torren. "You'll see!"
The communication screen went blank. Stan leaped to the meteor-repeller
controls and stared at the vertical vision-plate which showed all the
sky above.
"Not the shadow of a chance," he said coldly, "but a beam does make a
little glow! If he misses us once--but he won't--maybe I can get in one
blast...."
There was tense silence. Deadly silence. The screen overhead showed a
multitude of cold, unwinking stars. One of them winked out and on again.
"I'll try--" began Stan.
Then the screen seemed to explode into light. Something flared like
a nova in the sky. Intolerable brilliance filled a quarter of the
screen--and faded. Swiftly. It went out.
Stan drew a deep breath.
"That," he said softly, "I think was a hundred thousand million
horsepower in a power beam. I think our friends the grid makers have
been working on armament to fight us with, and I think they've got
something quite good! They don't like strangers. Torren was a stranger,
and they got a shot at him, and they took it. And now they'll get set
to come over here after us. If you'll excuse me, I'll go back to the
drive!"
He returned to the cabin where two out of a necessary eight graphite
bars were in place. He worked. Fast. No man ever worked so fast or so
fiercely or with such desperately steady hands. In twenty minutes he
made the last, the final connection. And just as he dropped the hatch
in place, Esther called anxiously:
"More machines coming, Stan! The microphones pick them up!"
"Coming!" he told her briskly. He went to the instrument board and
threw switches here and there. "The normal thing," he said evenly,
"would be to lift from the ground here, on landing drive, and go into
field drive out of atmosphere. But we won't do it for two reasons. One
is that we have no landing drive. The other is that at normal take-off
acceleration, our friends of the grid would take a potshot at us with
the thing they used on Rob Torren. With a hundred thousand million
horsepower. So--here goes!"
He stabbed a simple push button.
With no perceptible interval and with no sensation of movement, the
_Erebus_ was out in deep space. The screens showed stars on every
side--all the stars of the Galaxy. And these were not the hostile,
immobile, unfriendly stars the first voyagers of space had seen. With
the Bowdoin-Hall field collapsing forty times a second, the stars moved
visibly. The nearer ones moved more swiftly and the farther ones more
slowly, but all moved. The cosmos seemed very small and almost cosy,
and the stars mere fireflies and the Rim itself no more than a few
miles away from them.
Stan watched. He said, "We're not making much time. Not over six
hundred lights, I'd say. But we'll get there."
"And--and when we do--"
"H'm," said Stan. "You can swear Torren said he'd committed the crimes
he charged me with and faked the evidence against me. With that
testimony, they'll examine the evidence as they do when there are no
witnesses. It'll fall down. And I'll be cleared."
"Stan!" said Esther indignantly. "I meant--"
"And when I'm cleared," said Stan, "we'll get married."
"That," admitted Esther, "is what I had in mind."
He kissed her, and stood watching the moving cosmos critically.
"Our friends the grid builders have gotten waked up now," he observed.
"They know they're not the only intelligent race in the universe, and
they may not like it. They're a fretful crew! But they'll have to be
made friends with. And quick, or they might cause trouble! I think I'll
apply to be assigned to the task force that will undertake the job. It
ought to be interesting! Not a dull moment!"
Esther scowled at him.
"Now," she protested, "you reduce me to being glad we're not making our
proper speed! Because after you get back--"
"Listen, my dear," said Stan generously, "I'll promise to come home
from time to time. And when I do I'll grab you like this, and kiss you
like this--" There was an interlude. "And do you think you'll manage to
survive?"
Esther gasped for breath. But she was smiling.
"I--I think I'll be able to stand it," she admitted.
"Good!" said Stan. "Now let's go have some breakfast!"