footer.

She was not at all happy about being so strongly attracted to a man
several inches shorter than she. She was particularly unhappy about
feeling drawn to a man who was a coward.

The ship that they boarded on Moon Nine was one of the newer ships that
could attain a hundred-mile-per-second velocity and take a hyperbolic
path to Earth, but it would still require fifty-four days to make the
trip. So Trella was delighted to find that the ship was the _Cometfire_
and its skipper was her old friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired Jakdane
Gille.

"Jakdane," she said, flirting with him with her eyes as in days gone
by, "I need a chaperon this trip, and you're ideal for the job."

"I never thought of myself in quite that light, but maybe I'm getting
old," he answered, laughing. "What's your trouble, Trella?"

"I'm in love with that huge chunk of man who came aboard with me, and
I'm not sure I ought to be," she confessed. "I may need protection
against myself till we get to Earth."

"If it's to keep you out of another fellow's clutches, I'm your man,"
agreed Jakdane heartily. "I always had a mind to save you for myself.
I'll guarantee you won't have a moment alone with him the whole trip."

"You don't have to be that thorough about it," she protested hastily. "I
want to get a little enjoyment out of being in love. But if I feel
myself weakening too much, I'll holler for help."

The _Cometfire_ swung around great Jupiter in an opening arc and
plummeted ever more swiftly toward the tight circles of the inner
planets. There were four crew members and three passengers aboard the
ship's tiny personnel sphere, and Trella was thrown with Quest almost
constantly. She enjoyed every minute of it.

She told him only that she was a messenger, sent out to Ganymede to pick
up some important papers and take them back to Earth. She was tempted to
tell him what the papers were. Her employer had impressed upon her that
her mission was confidential, but surely Dom Blessing could not object
to Dr. Mansard's son knowing about it.

All these things had happened before she was born, and she did not know
what Dom Blessing's relation to Dr. Mansard had been, but it must have
been very close. She knew that Dr. Mansard had invented the surgiscope.

This was an instrument with a three-dimensional screen as its heart. The
screen was a cubical frame in which an apparently solid image was built
up of an object under an electron microscope.