"Nevertheless," said the skipper stiffly, "an' however, this time he's gone too far. He's been makin' eyes at my daughter."
"Your," I repeated slowly, "daughter!"
"You seen her. She come aboard at Long Island Port for the Venus trip." Here his space-gnarled, leathery face cracked into a grin that would have melted custard. "Pretty as a picture, don't you think? Some say she resembles me."
"Some people," I told him dazedly, "will say anything for a laugh." I was thinking about that girl. What a girl! Five and a half feet of cream and velvet, surmounted by hair the color of a Martian sunset. Eyes like blue haze over Venus, only alive with crinkly laughter. Sure, she resembled the skipper! They had the same number of arms and legs; they each had one nose and two eyes and two ears—but there the similarity ended. Their difference was that between a lumbering old space freighter like the Saturn and a modern, streamlined man-o'-war. And I do mean streamlined!
The skipper said sourly, "Well, get the blank look off your pan, Sparks. An' take down a special message from me to Mr. Romeo Biggs, on account of if I try to tell him myself I'll forget my dignity an' tear him into asteroids. Tell him that the next time I catch him tossin' goo-goo eyes at Diane, I'll give him a one-way ticket through the air-lock. That's all!"
And he left the turret, snorting. I stared after him dreamily. I found myself doing something I haven't done since I was a kid, counting off my name with that of Diane Hanson. "Friendship, courtship, love, hate, marriage—"
It came out "friendship." I told you I had my troubles....
After a while came a sound like a three-legged pelican doing the Martian fling in a cornpatch, and Lancelot Biggs ambled into my turret, eyes aglow, his unbelievable Adam's-apple bobbing up and down like a photon in a cyclotron. I could tell he was busting with the desire to spill his overflowing heart to me, but he said, "Trouble, Sparks?"
See? That's why you just couldn't help liking the guy. Soon as he saw me fiddling around the audio bank he was ready to help. It's hard to figure a jasper like Biggs. I sometimes thought he was the dumbest mortal who ever hopped gravs, but just about the time I'd be ready to delegate him to the Booby-hatch Convention he'd come through with a spark of brilliance that would make Sol look like an infra-red ray.