red and yellow stars--lay
spread around us. The moon, with nearly all its disc illumined, hung, a
great silver ball, over our bow quarter. Behind it, to one side, Mars
floated like the red tip of a smoldering cigarillo in the blackness. The
earth, behind our stern, was dimly, redly visible--a giant sphere,
etched with the configurations of its oceans and continents. Upon one
limb a touch of the sunlight hung on the mountain-tops with a crescent
red-yellow sheen.

And then we plunged from the cone-shadow. The sun, with the leaping
Corona, burst through the blackness behind us. The earth lighted into a
huge, thin crescent with hooked cusps.

To Snap and me, the glories of the heavens were too familiar to be
remarked. And upon this voyage particularly we were in no mood to
consider them. I had been in the helio-room several hours. When the
Planetara started, and my few routine duties were over, I could think of
nothing save Halsey's and Carter's admonition: "Be on your guard. And
particularly--watch George Prince."

I had not seen George Prince. But I had seen his sister, whom Carter and
Halsey had not bothered to mention. My heart was still pounding with the
memory....

* * * * *

When the passengers had retired and the ship quieted, I prowled through
the passenger corridors. This was about the trinight hour.[3] Hot as the
corridors of hell, with our hull and the glassite dome seething with the
friction of our atmospheric flight. But the refrigerators mitigated
that; the ventilators blasted cold air from the renewers into every
corner of the vessel. Within an hour or two, with the cold of space
striking us, it was hot air that was needed.

Dr. Frank evidently was having little trouble with pressure-sick
passengers[4]--the Planetara's equalizers were fairly efficient. I did
not encounter Dr. Frank. I prowled through the silent metal lounges and
passages. I went to the door of A 22. It was on the deck-level, in a
tiny transverse passage just off the main lounging room. Its name-grid
glowed with the letters: "_Anita Prince._" I stood in my short white
trousers and white silk shirt, like a cabin steward gawping. Anita
Prince! I had never heard the name until this night. But there was magic
music in it now, as I murmured it to myself. Anita Prince....

She was here, doubtless asleep, behind this small metal door. It seemed
as though that little oval grid were the gateway to a fairyland of