Salvage in Space
Page 6
in the gravity plates along the keel,before he could move it. He dragged it to the lock through which hehad entered the flier, and consigned it to space....
* * * * *
Five days later Thad brought the _Red Dragon_ into the atmosphere ofMars. A puzzled pilot came aboard, in response to his signals, anddocked the flier safely at Helion. Thad went down into the hold again,with the astonished port authorities who had come aboard to inspectthe vessel.
Again he passed among the grotesque and outrageous monsters in thehold, leading the gasping officers. While they marveled at thetreasure, he lifted the weirdly embellished lid of the coffer of whitecrystal, and looked once more upon the still form of the girl withinit.
Pity stirred him. An ache came in his throat.
Linda Cross, so quiet and cold and white, and yet so lovely. Howterrible her last days of life must have been, with doom shadowing thevessel, and the men vanishing mysteriously, one by one!Terrible--until she had sought the security of death.
Strangely, Thad felt no great elation at the thought that half theincalculable treasure about him was now safely his own, as the awardof salvage. If only the girl were still living.... He felt apoignantly keen desire to hear her voice.
Thad found the note when they started to lift her from the chest. Ahasty scrawl, it lay beneath her head, among glittering gems.
"This woman is not dead. Please have her given skilled medical attention as soon as possible. She lies in a state of suspended animation, induced by the injection of fifty minims of zeronel.
"She is my daughter, Linda Cross, and my sole heir.
"I entreat the finders of this to have care given her, and to keep in trust for her such part of the treasure on this ship as may remain after the payment of salvage or other claims.
"Sometime she will wake. Perhaps in a year, perhaps in a hundred. The purity of my drugs is uncertain, and the injection was made hastily, so I do not know the exact time that must elapse.
"If this is found, it will be because the lurking thing upon the ship has destroyed me and all my men.
"Please do not fail me.
Levington Cross."
Thad bought the white tower of his dreams, slim and graceful in itsMartian garden of saffron and purple, among the low ocher hills besideHelion. He carried the sleeping girl through the silver door where thegirl of his dreams had waited, and set the coffer in a great, vaultedchamber. Many times each day he came into the room where she lay, tolook into her pallid face, and feel her cold wrist. He kept a nurse inattendance, and had a physician call daily.
A long Martian year went by.
* * * * *
Looking in his mirror one day, Thad saw little wrinkles about hiseyes. He realized that the nervous strain and anxiety of waiting wasaging him. And it might be a hundred years, he remembered, beforeLinda Cross came from beneath the drug's influence.
He wondered if he should grow old and infirm, while Linda lay stillyoung and beautiful and unchanged in her sleep; if she might awake,after long years, and see in him only a feeble old man. And he knewthat he would not be sorry he had waited, even if he should die beforeshe revived.
On the next day, the nurse called him into the room where Linda lay.He was bending over her when she opened her eyes. They were blue,glorious.
A long time she looked up at him, first in fearful wonder, then withconfidence, and dawning understanding. And at last she smiled.
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