"Thanks for taking the blame, but it's my fault entirely—I know it as well as you do," she replied, flushing uncomfortably. "I do know how to dance, too, but—Well, you're a Gray Lensman, you know."
"Huh?" he ejaculated, in honest surprise, and she looked up at him for the first time. "What has that fact got to do with the price of Venerian orchids in Chicago—or with my clumsy walking all over your slippers?"
"Everything in the world," she assured him. Nevertheless, her stiff young body relaxed and she fell into the graceful, accurate dancing which she really knew so well how to do. "You see, I don't suppose that any of us has ever seen a Gray Lensman before, except in pictures, and actually to be dancing with one is so thrilling that it is really a shock—I have to get used to it gradually, so to speak. Why, I don't even know how to talk to you! One couldn't possibly call you plain mister, as one would any ord—"
"It'll be QX if you just call me 'say'!" he informed her. "Maybe you'd rather not dance with a dub? What say we go get us a sandwich and a bottle of fayalin or something?"
"No—never!" she exclaimed. "I didn't mean it that way at all. I'm going to have this full dance with you, and enjoy every second of it. And later I am going to pack this dance card—which I hope you will sign for me—away in lavender, so it will go down in history that in my youth I really did dance with Gray Lensman Kinnison. I see that I have recovered enough so that I can talk and dance at the same time. Do you mind if I ask you some silly questions about space?"
"Go ahead. They won't be silly, if I'm any judge. Elementary, perhaps, but not silly."
"I hope so, but I think you're being charitable again. Like most of the girls here, I suppose, I have never been out in deep space at all. Besides a few hops to the Moon, I have taken only two flits, and they were both only interplanetary. One to Mars and one to Venus. I never could see how you deep-space men can really understand what you're doing—either the frightful speeds at which you travel, the distance you cover, or the way your communicators work. In fact, a professor told us that no human mind can understand figures of those magnitudes at all. But you must understand them, I should think ... oh, perhaps—"
"Or maybe the guy isn't human?" Kinnison laughed deeply, infectiously. "No, your professor was right. We can't understand the figures, but we don't have to—all we have to do is to work with them. And, now that it has just percolated through my skull who you really are, that you are Gladys Forrester, it is quite clear that you are in that same boat."
"Me? How?" she exclaimed.