"Not take you?" he echoed. "Of course, I'm going to take you. You can't very well refuse now." He grinned triumphantly, feeling something of a devil. He rather liked the sensation.
The girl was suddenly serious. "Have you heard the news?"
"News? I haven't heard any news."
"It just came over the radio. The Comet disappeared three days out from Ganymede. She was escorted by a corvette of the Martian Navy, too."
The Comet, he knew, was a semi-passenger freighter of Martian register. "But the corvette?" he echoed blankly, feeling suddenly a bit frightened and confused.
"It vanished too." She snapped her fingers. "Just like that. But before they disappeared, they reported three flashes in space dead ahead. Then their signals stopped."
He opened his mouth.
"Wait," said the girl. "You haven't heard it all. The Observatory on Ganymede had them in sight all the time. A short while after the ship's radio messages stopped coming through, they noticed that the Comet was disappearing just as if she were disintegrating. The disintegration started at the stern and slowly worked forward until the ship was completely gone." She shuddered. "When I heard the news coming over the caster it reminded me of an old, old story of a grinning cheshire cat. The cat disappeared tail first until even the grin was gone."
"Alice in Wonderland," said Norman mechanically. "That was written by Lewis Carroll, a famous writer of antiquity."
"What do you think it is?"