“Marry you, you red-haired brute?” Joan cried passionately. “I shall never marry you. Besides I do not want a husband. I am just a school girl. I will not be thinking of marrying for ten years.”
“You are old enough—quite old enough. I like them young. But you will have to be satisfied with a rather crude ceremony. We go very little on ceremonies here, especially religious ceremonies. There are no priests here, no churches here, no god to solemnize a marriage. I am the only god here, but believe me I am a big one. I make and unmake worlds.”
“You will never call this girl wife,” Epworth said softly. “Not as long as I live.”
“Then you would fight for her? Fine.” He paused and looked at them with narrowing eyes. “But I am forgetting the astronomical lecture. I am the man who is doing things with the moon. I am transforming that satellite, which is a boiling caldron for fourteen days and then a freezing Arctic Ocean for fourteen days, into a pleasant place to live. It will be a place where I can take my sweet comrades, and establish a colony which will not be annoyed by world dictators or tyrannical democracies.”
He paused and drew his hand across his huge mouth, exposing his horse teeth as his hand left his face. The act proved so repulsive to Joan that she turned her head. The giant noted this and frowned. The frown was not pleasant to behold.
“The moon you are aware has for untold centuries been a dead planet,” he continued without rebuking the girl but with a sinister contortion of his under lip. “The scientists tell us that there is no atmosphere there; no plant life; no water; and that men cannot live there even if they could go there. I am fixing that all up, working the moon over so that we will find life quite pleasant when we go there. I am sending rocket projectiles loaded with water from the Arctic Ocean to the moon. A projectile leaves here loaded with ice; immediately behind it goes another projectile carrying liquid air, hydrogen and oxygen. Both projectiles hit in the same spot on the moon, and the liquid air explodes and forms a protecting velvet for the ice water when it melts.”
He paused, and began to laugh, his sides shaking up and down ludicrously. Again Joan had to turn her head; again he eyed her savagely without saying anything for a second. When he spoke there was a threat in his voice.
“When you are my wife you’re going to have to watch your risibilities,” he said gently. “But to proceed. We delay—spread out too much for your small minds. Taking cognizance of my projectiles, you see the beginning to the Lake of Vapours. Fearing that there may be no nitrogen on the moon I am sending frequent projectiles loaded with saltpeter to unite with the supposed volcanic soils, and make vegetable life possible. In addition I am sending all kinds of seeds—vegetable seeds, flower seeds, fruit tree seeds, cereal seeds. They go mixed with commercial fertilizer liquidized.”
“And you get the saltpeter and fertilizer from——”
The giant did not wait for Epworth to finish his sentence.