"Well, I'll count 'em and point 'em out to you, then—or, better, how about that little gold locket, with 'CM' engraved on it, that you're wearing under your uniform? I can't smell that, nor the picture in it—" The man's thought faltered in embarrassment. "My picture! Klono's whiskers, Mac, where did you get that—and why?"
"It's a reduction that Admiral Haynes let me have made. I am wearing it because I love you—I've said that before."
The girl's entrancing smile was now in full evidence. She knew now that he could see, that he would never be the helpless hulk which she had so gallingly thought him doomed to become, and her spirits rose in ecstatic relief. But he would never take the initiative now. Well, then, she would; and this was as good an opening as she ever would have with the stubborn brute. Therefore:
"More than that, as I said before, I am going to marry you, whether you like it or not." She blushed a heavenly—and discordant—magenta, but went on unfalteringly: "And not out of pity, either, Kim, or just to take care of you. It's older than that—much older."
"It can't be done, Mac." His thought was a protest to high Heaven at the injustice of Fate. "I've thought it over out in space a thousand times—thought until I was black in the face—but I get the same result every time. It's just simply no soap. You are much too fine a woman—too splendid, too vital, too much of everything a woman should be—to be tied down for life to a thing that's half steel, rubber, and phenoline. It just simply is not on the wheel, that's all."
"You're full of pickles, Kim." Gone was all her uncertainty and nervousness. She was calm, poised; glowing with a transcendent inward beauty. "I didn't really know until this minute that you love me, too, but I do now. Don't you realize, you big, dumb, wonderful clunker, that as long as there's one single, little bit of a piece of you left alive I'll love that piece more than I ever could any other man's entire being?"
"But I can't, I tell you!" He groaned the thought. "I can't and I won't! My job isn't done yet, either, and the next time they'll probably get me. I can't let you waste yourself, Mac, on a fraction of a man for a fraction of a lifetime!"
"QX, Gray Lensman." Clarrissa was serene, radiantly untroubled. She could make things come out right now; everything was on the green. "We'll put this back up on the shelf for a while. I'm afraid that I have been terribly remiss in my duties as a nurse. Patients mustn't be excited or quarreled with, you know."
"That's another thing. How come you, a sector chief, to be on ordinary room duty, and night duty at that?"
"Sector chiefs assign duties, don't they?" she retorted sunnily. "Now I'll give you a rub and change some of these dressings."