Alice sat up. "Jerry!" she cried. "Has he taken your ship?" He smiled.
"No—just the opposite. Our men are fighting it out in the control room; Captain Cole has been so kind as to offer me individual combat."
The pirate chuckled richly, "Pray speak no more of it. I thought you would be pleased to see your Alice again—she is an extraordinarily high-principled young lady. She has refused to join my little band. Well; perhaps she was right—we shall soon see.
"I believe the choice of weapon is mine?"
"Certainly, Captain," answered Jerry according to formula. "And they will be—?"
"Boarding pikes," said the pirate succinctly. "There is a pair here, if you will excuse me." He opened a locker in a corner of the room and withdrew two of the vicious five-foot pole-arms from it. Jerry accepted his weapon with a murmur of thanks and examined it briefly. He struck its shaft over his knee and smiled at its satisfactory weight. "Shall we fight free or formal?" he asked Cole.
"Formal, if Miss Adams will be good enough to referee." The girl nodded, her face white. "The line of combat is not to be departed from,"
she began in the traditional phrasing, "and will extend along the center of the room from the door to the bed.
"The first figure will be low-crossed; challenger, Captain Leigh, attacking. The defender, Captain Cole, will attempt to disarm the challenger within three disengagements." She poised her handkerchief.
"At the drop of the scarf," she said, "the challenger will attack."
It fell to the floor, and Jerry hooked a tine of his weapon into the pirate's guard and swung upward, then darted at the chest of his enemy. There was a clash of steel, and—his hands were stinging and empty. He had been disarmed. Cole stood smiling, his pike held easily, waiting for the next figure, as Jerry's mind raced furiously back to the days of his school training. He remembered another such disarming at the hands of an old, quick instructor. He had been padded then, and the blades of the pike could not, dulled, penetrate his quartz practice helmet.
Faintly he heard or seemed to hear the instructor's voice say, "Counter once conventionally; then engage, and rocking from the heels twist and thrust at once to disarm." Grimly Jerry smiled. He would not forget again.
"Second figure," said Alice faintly. "The defender will attack high,-
cross; the challenger will attempt to disarm within three engagements."
Again the handkerchief—"scarf" in the language of the pike—fell, and again the steel clashed.
For many minutes they battled through twelve figures; Leigh had again parried Cole's blade, and they turned to Alice. But she was in no condition to continue, having fainted when the pirate's blade had swooped past Jerry's cheek a moment ago.
"Since the referee is incapacitated," said the pirate, after a moment of thought, "shall we continue fighting—free?"
"Challenger agrees," said Jerry. "On guard!" And again the vicious pikes glistened in the light, swinging madly. Jerry abandoned the formal line of combat and cut fiercely at Cole's head, who grinned and swung at his enemy's chest with a practiced flick of his wrists. Jerry sprang back, blood pouring from his side and shortened his grip by three feet of the haft, leaped through an opening, and stretched his body into one terrible blow that sent his blade through the belly of the pirate and out the other side.
The salvage man fell to the floor, and the transfixed body of Cole remained erect, propped on the pole of the weapon.
Jerry's own eyes closed quietly; his hands sought his side, and were wet with blood.
Jerry awoke in a very soft bed with those eyes swimming before his face and a sense of pressure on his lips. "What happened?" he asked, dizzily.
"I kissed you," said the eyes.
He considered. "What did you want to do a thing like that for?" he said.
"Just a hunch. It worked on the Sleeping Beauty, you know."
"Yeah, I guess so. Thanks. Where am I?"
"Marsport County Hospital," said the eyes. "Officially you are Gerald DePugh Leigh, master of the salvage scow Leigh Salvage, Incorporated, if there's anything else you want to know. That DePugh nearly changed my mind about you, but I decided that you could bury it as a crossroad with a stake through its heart and maybe it wouldn't bother us."
"This us business," he said reflectively. "Just what does it mean?"
"Why, Jerry!' said the eyes, deeply pained. "Don't you remember?"
"No," he said, "but whatever it was it seems to have been a good idea.
Did I propose to you?"
"Yes," she said, crossing her fingers. "And I accepted in good faith and here I find myself jilted practically at the—"
"Oh, all right," said Jerry irritably. "Will you marry me?"
"Yes," said the eyes.
There was a pause. "I wonder if you would know how I got here," he sleepily asked.
"I flew the ship back after you ran that Mother Goose murderer through and got your own appendix clipped. You'll be out of here soon—"
"Who flew the ship?"
"I did."
"A woman can't fly a—"
"This one did.
"Well …I suppose so—I feel myself getting drowsy. Do you think the Sleeping Beauty technique will work twice?"
"I'll try—" Jerry heard footsteps, and the eyes retreated. A thin, grey voice spoke up, "Ah, Leigh, I thought I'd call. As you no doubt remember I was telling you of my space-battle with the Mercurian Menace. We were jockeying for position when—"
"Alice, darling," said Jerry.
"Yes, dear?"
"Will you kick that man very hard, please?" He closed his eyes, heard a yelp of pain, and the slam of a door. He smiled sweetly in his sleep.
No Place to Go
Gallacher was no doctor of Philosophy or Science, no more than a humble "mister," and as such could not hope to rise beyond the modest university readership which he had held for some score of years. He was in the Department of Physics, and his job was little more than the especially dirty one of correcting examinations and reading the hardy perennial themes submitted by generation after generation of students.
He was also the man who punched calculating machines late into the afternoon, tabulating work of men higher up and preparing their further ground.
He left the university grounds as the sun was setting over the Hudson, jammed a dark green, crumpled felt hat on his head and walked briskly home to the five-room bungalow where he had lived since his marriage.
Entering through the kitchen door, he was greeted by no more than a curt nod from his wife and his buoyant gait reduced to a hesitant shuffle. For Mrs. Gallacher, with her bitter tongue, endless ills and higgling economy, was the terror of her husband.
Dinner was, as always, a grim affair punctuated by little bitter queries from the distaff side—money, always. Why didn't he stand up to Professor Van Bergen for a raise? Then he'd be able to get a little car and not have to walk two miles from home and back on the highway like a common tramp. And why didn't he see her cousin, the Realtor, about another place near here but where those terrible Palisades wouldn't arouse her acrophobia. Gallacher had shuddered when his wife, seven years ago, first proudly told him that she "had" acrophobia.
He knew then that it would not be the last said on the subject.
Vaguely he wiped his mouth with a napkin and said: "'M going down for a little tinkering …"
"Tinkering!" spat Mrs. Gallacher poisonously. "You in that cellar where I can't keep my washing machine because it's cluttered up with—"
He heard her out, smiling deprecatingly, and without answering went into the tiny foyer and opened the cellar door with two keys. His wife did not have copies of either.
Down the steps he snapped a switch, and the plot-sized basement sprang into sharp being under the glareless brilliance of the most modern refractory glow-tube installation. He smiled proudly on the place and its furnishings. This, he thought, is my real life, and I can deny it nothing.