and Duster Two floated side by side, their pilots playing no part in the conflict of wills that had just taken place, though they were dimly aware of it. No one watching from a distance could have guessed the issues that had been at stake, the lives and destinies that had trembled in the balance; and the two men involved would never talk of it again.
Indeed, they were already concerned with something else. For in the same instant, they had both become aware of a highly ironic situation.
All the time they had been standing there, so intent upon their own affairs that they had never looked at the screen of the infrared scanner, it had been patiently holding the picture they sought.
When Pat and Sue had completed their inventory and emerged from the air-lock galley, the passengers were still far back in Restoration England. Sir Isaac's brief physics lecture had been followed, as might easily have been predicted, by a considerably longer anatomy lesson from Nell Gwyn. The audience was thoroughly enjoying itself, especially as Barrett's English accent was now going full blast.
"'"Forsooth, Sir Isaac, you are indeed a man of great knowledge. Yet, methinks there is much that a woman might teach you."
"'"And what is that, my pretty maid?"
"'Mistress Nell blushed shyly.
"'"I fear," she sighed, "that you have given your life to the things of the mind. You have forgotten, Sir Isaac, that the body, also, has much strange wisdom."
"'"Call me 'Ike,'" said the sage huskily, as his clumsy fingers tugged at the fastenings of her blouse.
"'"Not here - in the palace!" Nell protested, making no effort to hold him at bay. "The King will be back soon!"
"'"Do not alarm yourself, my pretty one. Charles is roistering with that scribbler Pepys. We'll see naught of him tonight - "'"
If we ever get out of here, thought Pat, we must send a letter of thanks to the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl on Mars who is supposed to have written this nonsense. She's keeping everyone amused, and that's all that matters now.
No; there was someone who was definitely not amused. He became uncomfortably aware that Miss Morley was trying to catch his eye. Recalling his duties as skipper, he turned toward her and gave her a reassuring but rather strained smile.
She did not return it; if anything, her expression became even more forbidding. Slowly and quite deliberately, she looked at Sue Wilkins and then back at him.
There was no need for words. She had said, as clearly as if she had shouted it at the top of her voice: "I know what you've been doing, back there in the air lock."
Pat felt his face flame with indignation, the righteous indignation of a man who had been unjustly accused. For a moment he sat frozen in his seat, while the blood pounded in his cheeks. Then he muttered to himself: "I'll show the old bitch."
He rose to his feet, gave Miss Morley a smile of poisonous sweetness, and said just loudly enough for her to hear: "Miss Wilkins! I think we've forgotten something. Will you come back to the air lock?"
As the door closed behind them once more, interrupting the narration of an incident that threw the gravest possible doubts upon the paternity of the Duke of St. Albans, Sue Wilkins looked at him in puzzled surprise.
"Did you see that?" he said, still boiling.
"See what?"
"Miss Morley - "
"Oh," interrupted Sue, "don't worry about her, poor thing. She's been eying you ever since we left the Base. You know what her trouble is."
"What?" asked Pat, already uncomfortably sure of the answer.
"I suppose you could call it ingrowing virginity. It's a common complaint, and the symptoms are always the same. There's only one cure for it."
The ways of love are strange and tortuous. Only ten minutes ago, Pat and Sue had left the air lock together, mutually agreed to remain in a state of chaste affection. But now the improbable combination of Miss Morley and Nell Gwyn, and the feeling that one might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb-as well as, perhaps, the instinctive knowledge of their bodies that, in the long run, love was the only defense against death - had combined to overwhelm them. For a moment they stood motionless in the tiny, cluttered space of the galley; then, neither knowing who moved first, they were in each other's arms.
Sue had time to whisper only one phrase before Pat's lips silenced her.
"Not here," she whispered, "in the palace!"
Chapter 13
Chief