He kicked the hatch closed, shutting out the light from beneath, and they stood alone, a man and a woman amid the stars.
Women are funny, Brace thought. They know things. She knows what I have to do. She isn't fighting. He swallowed with difficulty and looked at her. She was standing straight, looking up at the stars. There were millions of them in the black of space, myriads of lights in a sea of night.
"The night has a thousand eyes," she murmured.
A tingle ran through Brace's nerves. The night has a thousand eyes. The night has a thousand eyes. Who had said that? The memory eluded him, played tag with him, then he caught it. It was so long ago—or did it only seem long ago?
It was the great Martian Central Spaceport and the night overhead, the bowl of heaven as infinitely far away, as infinitely contemptuous of man as it was now, yet somehow watching. He was fifteen. By day, he sweated, loading, stacking, clamping down great crates and bales in the hulls of giant ships, hating them, hating the sky, hating all things, a tough, space-rat kid, knowing no father or mother but work, sweat, and the fists of others.
Then the ship had landed, a great passenger liner which carried only the finest cargo. Its captain was so tall, so ramrod straight, as though he had not a backbone like other men but a bar of chilled steel. And the girl had come from that ship, the captain's daughter. She had no mother either and they had found a strange kinship.
They had sat by the towering hulk of that huge ship and she'd said it—the night has a thousand eyes—and he'd loved her with the love of a thousand hearts. Yet she was as forever removed from him as were the thousand eyes of night. But what was her name? Cecelia! And what came after the night has a thousand eyes? He didn't know, couldn't remember. Her tall, straight father had come out then and without hesitation, had struck him down and the night had ten thousand times a thousand eyes.
But he'd seen her again, through the steel fencing of the Spaceport. He was on the outside. Her father had seen to that. Through scalding tears, he had seen her, and he swore that someday he would have a ship, that someday he would be a captain. And the young love had poured from his heart leaving an empty shell behind, and from that emptiness, he watched the ship rise and disappear, unashamed tears streaming down his homely face. She had said she would wait, that she'd wait forever, and then—
Brace stopped remembering and put one hairy paw over his face. He was a captain now, captain of a dirty, battered hulk that plied the spaces decent ships disdained. He had a crew, if you wanted to call it that, and he carried cargo, sometimes legally, most times not.