"I have been called rash ere now."
Her eyes glowed up into his. "Should I challenge you, Captain Thorne?
Beg you to accompany us?"
His lips hardened and she felt the spring-steel body stiffen. "I am not
on display, Miss Chanler. Not even for you."
Her smile faded and she drew away, moving from the hall out upon a
deep-niched balcony overlooking the restless Nergal Sea and the nodding
Martian ships swaying on the moon-dappled roadstead. The towers of
Vulhan City lay about them, dark shadows in the ultramarine of the
night, for these Martian cities were not air-domed.
Her eyes sought his, not lightly. "You think I ask selfishly, Captain
Thorne. You are right. But not as you think. If I ask you to accompany
me for a short cruise, though it be on a flimsy pleasure-yacht, it is
not to exhibit you as some glittering prize of the light social whirl
I inhabit, believe me. I know your story, of course. One of my duties
concerns aspects of public health and I've a bill hearing designed to
relieve some of the handicaps space-sick fliers labor under. You are
living proof they can overcome the handicaps of disease or drink or
drugs. I speak frankly, you see. Figures and charts put the Council
nodding. Your name will not."
"I see," he slowly agreed. He looked away. She had shown him the
strength beneath her loveliness.
"You alone cannot abrogate the old laws forbidding t'ang addicts, cured
or not, returning to Earth," he countered.
"I can try," she insisted. "I like this position, Captain Thorne, to
keep it I have to earn my salary, and social legislation is the coin I
pay into the treasury." She laughed, shaking her long black hair about
her gleaming bare shoulders. "I have been frank with you, sir. Will you
come?"
"You make it a duty," he protested. His slow smile swept her lithe
beauty in the moonlight as the music rose again to draw them within the
tall white palace.