Northwest of Earth Read Online Free

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,” he told himself unsteadily. Had he imagined that scarlet hair? After all, she was no more than a pretty brown girl-creature from one of the many half-human races peopling the planets. No more than that, after all. A pretty little thing, but animal … He laughed, a little shakily.
    “No more of that,” he said. “God knows I’m no angel, but there’s got to be a limit somewhere. Here.” He crossed to the bed and sorted out a pair of blankets from the untidy heap tossing them to the far corner of the room. “You can sleep there.”
    Wordlessly she rose from the floor and began to rearrange the blankets, the uncomprehending resignation of the animal eloquent in every line of her.
    *
    Smith had a strange dream that night. He thought he had awakened to a room full of darkness and moonlight and moving shadows, for the nearer moon of Mars was racing through the sky and everything on the planet below her was endued with a restless life in the dark. And something … some nameless, unthinkable thing … was coiled about his throat … something like a soft snake, wet and warm. It lay loose and light about his neck … and it was moving gently, very gently, with a soft, caressive pressure that sent little thrills of delight through every nerve and fiber of him, a perilous delight—beyond physical pleasure, deeper than joy of the mind. That warm softness was caressing the very roots of his soul and with a terrible intimacy. The ecstasy of it left him weak, and yet he knew—in a flash of knowledge born of this impossible dream—that the soul should not be handled … And with that knowledge a horror broke upon him, turning the pleasure into a rapture of revulsion, hateful, horrible—but still most foully sweet. He tried to lift his hands and tear the dream-monstrosity from his throat—tried but half-heartedly; for though his soul was revolted to its very deeps, yet the delight of his body was so great that his hands all but refused the attempt. But when at last he tried to lift his arms a cold shock went over him and he found that he could not stir … his body lay stony as marble beneath the blankets, a living marble that shuddered with a dreadful delight through every rigid vein.
    The revulsion grew strong upon him as he struggled against the paralyzing dream—a struggle of soul against sluggish body—titanically, until the moving dark was streaked with blankness that clouded and closed about him at last and he sank back into the oblivion from which he had awakened.
    Next morning, when the bright sunlight shining through Mars’s clear thin air awakened him, Smith lay for a while trying to remember. The dream had been more vivid than reality, but he could not now quite recall … only that it had been more sweet and horrible than anything else in life. He lay puzzling for a while, until a soft sound from the corner aroused him from his thoughts and he sat up to see the girl lying in a cat-like coil on her blankets, watching him with round, grave eyes. He regarded her somewhat ruefully.
    “Morning,” he said. “I’ve just had the devil of a dream … Well, hungry?”
    She shook her head silently, and he could have sworn there was a covert gleam of strange amusement in her eyes.
    He stretched and yawned, dismissing the nightmare temporarily from his mind.
    “What am I going to do with you?” he inquired, turning to more immediate matters. “I’m leaving here in a day or two and I can’t take you along, you know. Where’d you come from in the first place?”
    Again she shook her head.
    “Not telling? Well, it’s your business. You can stay here until I give up the room. From then on you’ll have to do your own worrying.”
    He swung his feet to the floor and reached for his clothes.
    Ten minutes later, slipping the heat-gun into its holster at his thigh, Smith turned to the girl. “There’s food-concentrate in that box on the table. It ought to hold you until I get back. And you’d better