She was small and soft against me. Her face,
framed in the thick, black hair, smiled up at me. Small, oval
face--beautiful--yet firm of chin, and stamped with the mark of its own
individuality. No empty-headed beauty, this.

"I'm all right, thank you very much--"

I became conscious that I had not released her. I felt her hands pushing
at me. And then it seemed that for an instant she yielded and was
clinging. And I met her startled, upflung gaze. Eyes like a purple night
with the sheen of misty starlight in them.

I heard myself murmuring, "I beg your pardon. Yes, of course!" I
released her.

She thanked me again and followed the carrier along the deck. She was
limping slightly from the twisted ankle.

An instant, while she had clung to me--and I had held her. A brief flash
of something, from her eyes to mine--from mine back to hers. The poets
write that love can be born of such a glance. The first meeting, across
all the barriers of which love springs unsought, unbidden--defiant,
sometimes. And the troubadours of old would sing: "A fleeting glance; a
touch; two wildly beating hearts--and love was born."

I think, with Anita and me, it must have been like that....

I stood gazing after her, unconscious of Dr. Frank, who was watching me
with his humorous smile. And presently, no more than a quarter beyond
the zero hour, the Planetara got away. With the dome-windows battened
tightly, we lifted from the landing stage and soared over the glowing
city. The phosphorescence of the electronic tubes was like a comet's
tail behind us as we slid upward.

At the trinight hour the heat of our atmospheric passage was over. The
passengers had all retired. The ship was quiet, with empty decks and
dim, silent corridors. Vibrationless, with the electronic engines cut
off and only the hum of the Martel magnetizers to break the unnatural
stillness. We were well beyond the earth's atmosphere, heading out in
the cone-path of the earth's shadow, in the direction of the moon.

CHAPTER III

_In the Helio-room_

At six A. M., earth Eastern time, which we were still carrying, Snap
Dean and I were alone in his instrument room, perched in the network
over the Planetara's deck. The bulge of the dome enclosed us; it rounded
like a great observatory window some twenty feet above the ceiling of
this little metal cubby-hole.

The Planetara was still in the earth's shadow. The firmament--black
interstellar space with its blazing white,