The Skylark of Space by E. E. Smith (books like beach read .TXT) 📕

until he knew that I couldn’t see any man except you. Much as we like Martin, we’ve got to admit that about him. He’s been chased so much that he’s wild. If any other girl he knows had talked to him that long, he would have been off to the North Pole or somewhere the next morning, and the best part of it is that he didn’t think anything of it.”

“You think she is domesticating the wild man?”

“Now, Dick, don’t be foolish. You know what I mean. Martin is a perfect dear, but if she knew that he is the M. Reynolds Crane, everything would be ruined. You know yourself how horribly hard it is to get through his shell to the real Martin underneath. He is lonely and miserable inside, I know, and the right kind of girl, one that would treat him right, would make life Heaven for him, and herself too.”

“Yes, and the wrong kind would make it⁠ ⁠…”

“She would,” interrupted Dorothy hastily, “but Peggy’s the right kind. Wouldn’t it be fine to have Martin and Peggy as happy, almost, as you and I are?”

“All right, girlie, I’m with you,” he answered, embracing her as though he intended never to let her go, “but you’d better go get some sleep⁠—you’re all in.”

Considerably later, when Dorothy had finally gone, Seaton settled himself for the long vigil. Promptly at the end of the twelve hours Crane appeared, alert of eye and of bearing.

“You look fresh as a daisy, Mart. Feeling fit?”

“Fit as the proverbial fiddle. I could not have slept any better or longer if I had had a week off. Seven hours and a half is a luxury, you know.”

“All wrong, old top. I need eight every night, and I’m going to take about ten this time.”

“Go to it, twelve if you like. You have earned it.”

Seaton stumbled to his room and slept as though in a trance for ten hours. Rising, he took his regular morning exercises and went into the saloon. All save Martin were there, but he had eyes only for his sweetheart, who was radiantly beautiful in a dress of deep bronze-brown.

“Good morning, Dick,” she hailed him joyously. “You woke up just in time⁠—we are all starving again, and were just going to eat without you!”

“Good morning, everybody. I would like to eat with you, Dottie, but I’ve got to relieve Martin. How’d it be for you to bring breakfast into the engine room and cheer my solitude, and let Crane eat with the others?”

“Fine⁠—that’s once you had a good idea, if you never have another!”

After the meal DuQuesne, who abhorred idleness with all his vigorous nature, took the watches of the party and went upstairs to the “shop,” which was a completely-equipped mechanical laboratory, to repair them. Seaton stayed at the board, where Dorothy joined him as a matter of course. Crane and Margaret sat down at one of the windows.

She told him her story, frankly and fully, shuddering with horror as she recalled the awful, helpless fall, during which Perkins had met his end.

“Dick and I have a heavy score to settle with that Steel crowd and with DuQuesne,” Crane said slowly. “We have no evidence that will hold in law, but some day DuQuesne will overreach himself. We could convict him of abduction now, but the penalty for that is too mild for what he has done. Perkins’ death was not murder, then?”

“Oh, no, it was purely self-defense. Perkins would have killed him if he could. And he really deserved it⁠—Perkins was a perfect fiend. The Doctor, as they call him, is no better, although entirely different. He is so utterly heartless and ruthless, so cold and scientific. Do you know him very well?”

“We know all that about him, and more. And yet Dorothy said he saved her life?”

“He did, from Perkins, but I still think it was because he didn’t want Perkins meddling in his affairs. He seems to me to be the very incarnation of a fixed purpose⁠—to advance himself in the world.”

“That expresses my thoughts exactly. But he slips occasionally, as in this instance, and he will again. He will have to walk very carefully while he is with us. Nothing would please Dick better than an excuse for killing him, and I must admit that I feel very much the same way.”

“Yes, all of us do, and the way he acts proves what a machine he is. He knows just exactly how far to go, and never goes beyond it.”

They felt the Skylark lurch slightly.

“Oh, Mart!” called Seaton. “Going to pass that star we were headed for⁠—too fast to stop. I’m giving it a wide berth and picking out another one. There’s a big planet a few million miles off in line with the main door, and another one almost dead ahead⁠—that is, straight down. We sure are traveling. Look at that sun flit by!”

They saw the two planets, one like a small moon, the other like a large star, and saw the strange sun increase rapidly in size as the Skylark flew on at such a pace that any earthly distance would have been covered as soon as it was begun. So appalling was their velocity that their ship was bathed in the light of that sun for only a short time, then was again surrounded by the indescribable darkness. Their seventy-two-hour flight without a pilot had seemed a miracle, now it seemed entirely possible that they might fly in a straight line for weeks without encountering any obstacle, so vast was the emptiness in comparison with the points of light that punctuated it. Now and then they passed so close to a star that it apparently moved rapidly, but for the most part the silent sentinels stood, like distant mountain peaks to the travelers in an express train, in the same position for many minutes.

Awed by the immensity of the universe, the two at the window were silent, not with the silence of