t a man of
Strom's discernment would want her for his projected Utopia without
question.

She did not speak to him while the hero-worshipping crowd were
fluttering about him to their heart's content. When they finally left
him alone she came up to him silently, and sat on the floor beside
him.

"I want to thank you," she said quietly, clearly, "for what you did
for me and my brother, Mr.--"

"Finner. Quirl Finner. I have thought of you as Lenore, and wondered
how you were. How long has it been since they took me out? You see--"
he grinned, "I was asleep."

"Five days. At least, they turned off the lights five times for the
sleeping periods."

"The man who fought for you--how is he?"

"My brother--is dead!"

Quirl looked away so that he should not see the quick tears springing
to her eyes. But a few moments later he felt her cool hand on his
scarred forehead, and she was smiling bravely.

"Tragedies such as these, Quirl, were common in the lives of our
ancestors. They were able to bear them, and we can bear them. All his
life my poor brother has lived as a gentleman, sheltered, protected by
class barriers. When he died of pneumonia caused by the jagged end of
a broken rib--so Dr. Stoddard says--I think he had a lively sense of
satisfaction that he should end in such a way. If it had not been for
me--"

* * * * *

She came to him often, after that, to sit quietly by his side, and to
bring his food to him from the big community bowl which even the most
fastidious of the prisoners had come to look forward to. She told of
her life as the daughter of a capitalist who owned large mine holdings
on Titan. It would be about time for the _Celestia_ to reach Titan,
and her non-arrival would be causing anxiety to Lenore's father
awaiting her there. The void would be swarming with I.F.P. patrols,
but as the pirate ship was invisible nothing would be found but the
mysteriously looted and abandoned _Celestia_.

There was no longer any reason for concealing from her the fact that
he himself was a member of the I.F.P., and Quirl told Lenore of the
adventurous life he and his companions had led. Of forays to far-away
and as yet undisciplined Pluto, of tropical Venus and Mercury, where
the rains never cease, of the hostile and almost unknown planet of
Aryl, within the orbit of Mercury, where no man has ever seen a true
image of the landscape because of the stupendous and never-ending
mirages.