om
with us!"

"You're funny, Steve--like a crutch," she rebuked him, but smiled back,
an elusive dimple playing in one lovely brown cheek. "Looking right
through anybody is too ghastly for words, but I think they're perfectly
all x, anyway, in spite of their being so hideous and so cold-blooded!"

CHAPTER VI

A Frigid Civilization

"Hi, Percival Van Schravendyck Stevens!" Nadia strode purposely into
Stevens' room and seized him by the shoulder. "Are you going to sleep
all the way to Saturn? You answered me when I pounded on the partition
with a hammer, but I don't believe that you woke up at all. Get up,
you--breakfast will be all spoiled directly!"

"Huh?" Stevens opened one sluggish eye; then, as the full force of the
insult penetrated his consciousness, he came wide awake. "Lay off those
names, ace, or you'll find yourself walking back home!" he threatened.

"All x by me!" she retorted. "I might as well go home if you're going
to sleep _all_ the time!" and she widened her expressive eyes at him
impishly as she danced blithely back into the control room. As she went
out she slammed his door with a resounding clang, and Stevens pried
himself out of his bunk one joint at a time, dressed, and made himself
presentable.

"Gosh!" he yawned mightily as he joined the girl at breakfast. "I don't
know when I've had such a gorgeous sleep. How do you get by on so
little?"

"I don't. I sleep a lot, but I do it every night, instead of working for
four days and nights on end and then trying to make up all those four
nights' sleep at once. I'm going to break you of that, too, Steve, if
it's the last thing I ever do."

"There might be certain advantages in it, at that," he conceded, "but
sometimes you've got to do work when it's got to be done, instead of
just between sleeps. However, I'll try to do better. Certainly it is
a wonderful relief to get out of that mess, isn't it?"

"I'll say it is! But I wish that those folks were more like people.
They're nice, I think, really, but they're so ... so ... well, so
ghastly that it simply gives me the blue shivers just to look at one
of them!"

"They're pretty gruesome, no fooling," he agreed, "but you get used to
things like that. I just about threw a fit the first time I ever saw
a Martian, and the Venerians are even worse in some ways--they're so
clammy and dead-looking--but now I've got real friends on both planets.
One thing, though, gives me the pip. I read a sto