For the first time in many days Brandon and Westfall sat at dinner in the main dining room of the Sirius. They were enjoying greatly the unaccustomed pleasure of a leisurely, formal meal; but still their talk concerned the projection of pure forces instead of subjects more appropriate to the table; still their eyes paid more attention to diagrams drawn upon scraps of paper than to the diners about them.
"But I tell you, Quince, you're full of little red ants, clear to the neck!" Brandon snorted, as Westfall waved one of his arguments aside. "You must have had help to get that far off—no one man could possibly be as wrong as you are. Why, those fields absolutely will...."
"Hi, Quincy! Hi, Norman!" a merry voice interrupted. "Still fighting as usual, I see! What kind of knights are you, anyway, to rescue us poor damsels in distress, and then never even know that we're alive?" A tall, willowy brunette had seen the two physicists as she entered the saloon, and came over to their table, a hand outstretched to each in cordial greeting.
"Ho, Verna!" both men exclaimed, and came to their feet as they welcomed the smiling, graceful newcomer.
"Sit down here, Verna—we have hardly started," Westfall invited, and Brandon looked at the girl in assumed surprise as she seated herself in the proffered chair.
"Well, Verna, it's like this...." he began.
"That's enough!" she broke in. "That phrase always was your introduction to one of the world's greatest brainstorms. But I know that this is the first time you have had time even to eat like civilized beings, so I'll forgive you this once. Why all the registering of amazement, Norman?"
"I'm astonished that you aren't being monopolized by some husband or other. Surely the officers of the Arcturus weren't so dumb that they'd stand for your still being Verna Pickering, were they?"
"Not dumb, Norman, no. Far from it. But I'm still working for my M. R. S. degree, and I haven't succeeded in snaring it yet. You'd be surprised at how cagy those officers got after a few of them had been captured. But they are just like any other hunted game, I suppose—the antelopes that survive get pretty wild, you know," she concluded, plaintively.
"Well, that certainly is one tough break for a poor little girl," Brandon sympathized. "Quince, our little Nell, here, hasn't been done right by. I'm bashful and you're a woman-hater, but between us, some way, we've simply got to take steps."