She sat on the arm of my chair and leaned forward and for a minute I thought I was going to get my wish. But all she did was kiss me. She leaned her lips against mine and for about three minutes a pleasant tingling surged through me. Then I began to grow restless. I couldn't breathe and her lips were no longer warm and vibrant. I had to move her face to one side in order to inhale, and the instant I did so she swayed and her elbows descended on my chest. * * * * * A chill coursed through me. Her arms were rigid and she seemed almost weightless. Alarmed, I rose, grasped her wrists and eased her gently down into the chair. She just sat there staring up at me, her face a petrified mask and her body so utterly still that it did something to sound. In place of the faint susurrous which occupied space gives forth the chair seemed to be enveloped in a kind of auditory vacuum which chilled me to the core of my being. I can't remember how long I stood there with horror slapping at my brain like the tides of some cold, dead moon. I only know that I turned at last and went stumbling from her presence with one thought uppermost in my mind. I must get medical aid to her quickly, before that trance could deepen, before it could endanger her life. Going up in the jacket-lift to the sick bay I kept visualizing Ned Dawson's face. Dawson was a strong-jawed, competent physician with years of experience behind him and I was sure he would know what to do. He was usually in the sick bay attending to the many little sprains and bruises the men brought in with them from the crust. There was a flicker of violet light as the jacket-lift hummed to a stop. I stepped out and raced down a cold-lighted passageway to the "drug shop," my breath coming fast. On meta-glass chairs amidst a faint odor of antiseptics two men sat frozen, but I thought they were asleep. I went straight through the waiting space with scarcely a glance at them, and burst into the sick bay unannounced. Dawson was there all right, but he was bent nearly double, frozen in the act of applying a gauze bandage to the badly cut ankle of a miner who stood contemplating his navel like a schizophrene, his head sunken on his chest. * * * * * For an instant I just stood there gasping, too stunned to realize that I was staring at a physician who could no longer heal. It wasn't until I went up to him and discovered that his body was cold and his face a frozen mask that my brain started to soak up horror. I went reeling out into the passageway like a drunken man and tried to locate the commander, and found him at last in the control room with his body glinting in light-silvered dust.