"You're funny, Steve—like a crutch," she rebuked him, but smiled back, an elusive dimple playing in one lovely brown cheek. "Looking right through anybody is too ghastly for words, but I think they're perfectly all x, anyway, in spite of their being so hideous and so cold-blooded!"
CHAPTER VI
A Frigid Civilization
"Hi, Percival Van Schravendyck Stevens!" Nadia strode purposely into Stevens' room and seized him by the shoulder. "Are you going to sleep all the way to Saturn? You answered me when I pounded on the partition with a hammer, but I don't believe that you woke up at all. Get up, you—breakfast will be all spoiled directly!"
"Huh?" Stevens opened one sluggish eye; then, as the full force of the insult penetrated his consciousness, he came wide awake. "Lay off those names, ace, or you'll find yourself walking back home!" he threatened.
"All x by me!" she retorted. "I might as well go home if you're going to sleep all the time!" and she widened her expressive eyes at him impishly as she danced blithely back into the control room. As she went out she slammed his door with a resounding clang, and Stevens pried himself out of his bunk one joint at a time, dressed, and made himself presentable.
"Gosh!" he yawned mightily as he joined the girl at breakfast. "I don't know when I've had such a gorgeous sleep. How do you get by on so little?"
"I don't. I sleep a lot, but I do it every night, instead of working for four days and nights on end and then trying to make up all those four nights' sleep at once. I'm going to break you of that, too, Steve, if it's the last thing I ever do."
"There might be certain advantages in it, at that," he conceded, "but sometimes you've got to do work when it's got to be done, instead of just between sleeps. However, I'll try to do better. Certainly it is a wonderful relief to get out of that mess, isn't it?"