I slept fitfully, worrying, trying to
plan. Within a few hours we would be nearing the asteroid.

The time of sleep was nearly passed. My chronometer marked five A.M.
original Earth starting time. The seal of my cubby door hissed. The
door slowly opened.

Anita!

She stood there with her cloak around her. A distance away on the
shadowed deck Coniston was loitering.

"Anita!" I whispered it.

"Gregg, dear!"

She turned and gestured to the watching brigand. "I will not be long,
Coniston."

She came in and half closed the door upon us, leaving it open enough
so that we could make sure that Coniston did not advance.

I stepped back where he could not see us. "Anita!"

She flung herself into my opened arms.

XV

A moment when, beyond the thought of the nearby brigand--or the
possibility of an eavesdropping ray trained now upon my cubby--a
moment while Anita and I held each other, and whispered those things
which could mean nothing to the world, but which were all the world to
us!

Then it was she whose wits brought us back from the shining fairyland
of our love, into the sinister reality of the _Planetara_.

"Gregg, if they are listening--"

I pushed her away. This brave little masquerader! Not for my life, or
for all the lives on the ship, would I consciously have endangered
her.

"But Grantline's findings!" I said aloud. "In his message--see here,
Prince--"

Coniston was too far away on the deck to hear us. Anita went to my
door again and waved at him reassuringly. I put my ear to the door
opening and listened at the space across the grid of the ventilator
over my bunk. The hum of a vibration would have been audible at those
two points. But there was nothing.

"It's all right," I whispered, and she clung to me--so small beside
me. With the black robe thrown aside, it seemed that I could not miss
the curves of her woman's figure. A dangerous game she was playing.
Her hair had been cut short to the base of her neck, in the fashion of
her dead brother. Her eyelashes had been clipped: the line of her
brows altered. And now, in the light of my tube as it shone upon her
earnest face, I could remark other changes. Glutz, the little beauty
specialist, was in this secret. With plastic skill he had altered the
set of her jaw--put masculinity here.

She was whispering: "It was--was poor George whom Miko shot."

I had now the true version of what had occurred. Miko had been forcing
his wooing upon A