"How strange you look, Prince!" He took a step forward. He was grim
and calm. Horribly calm. Deliberate. Gloating like a great gray
monster in human form toying with a fascinated, imprisoned bird.
"Move just a little, Prince. Let the zed-ray light fall more fully."
Anita's head was bare. That pale, Hamlet-like face. Dear God, the
zed-ray light lay gray and penetrating upon it!
Miko took another step. Peering. Grinning. "How amazing, George
Prince! Why, I can hardly believe it!"
Moa was armed with an electronic cylinder now. For all her
amazement--what turgid emotions sweeping her I can only guess--she
never took her eyes from Snap and me.
"Back! Don't move either of you!" she hissed at us.
Then Miko leaped at Anita like a giant gray leopard pouncing.
"Away with that cloak, Prince!"
I stood cold and numbed. And realization came at last. The faint
zed-light had fallen by chance upon Anita's face. Penetrating the
flesh; exposed, faintly glowing, the bone line of her jaw. Unmasked
the art of Glutz.
Miko seized her wrists, drew her forward, beyond the shaft of
zed-light, into the brilliant light of the Moon. And ripped her cloak
from her. The gentle curves of her woman's figure were so
unmistakable!
And as Miko gazed at them, all his calm triumph swept away.
"Why, Anita!"
I heard Moa mutter, "So that is it?" A venomous flashing look--a shaft
from me to Anita and back again. "So that is it?"
"Why, Anita!"
Miko's great arms gathered her up as though she were a child. "So I
have you back! From the dead, delivered back to me!"
"Gregg!" Snap's warning, and his grip on my shoulders brought me a
measure of sanity. I had tensed to spring. I stood quivering, and Moa
thrust her weapon against my face. The grids were swaying again with a
message from Grantline. But it was ignored.
In the glare of moonlight by the forward window, Miko held Anita, his
great hands pawing her with triumphant possessive caresses.
"So, little Anita, you are given back to me!"
XX
Moonlight upon Earth so gently shines to make romantic a lover's
smile! But the reality of the Lunar night is cold beyond human belief.
Cold and darkly silent. Grim desolation. Awesome. Majestic. A frowning
majesty that even to the most intrepid human beholder is inconceivably
forbidding.
And there were humans here now. On this tumbled plain, between
Archimedes and the mountains, one small crater amid the million of its
fellows was distinguished this night by the presence of humans. The
Grantline camp! It huddled in the deepest purple shadows on the side
of a bowl-like pit, a crudely circular orifice with a scant two miles
across its rippling rim. There was faint light here to mark the
presence of the living intruders. The blue glow radiance of Morrell
tube lights under a spread of glassite.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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